Famed game designer Richard Garriott has returned from his two-year hiatus from the game industry, during which NASA launched him as a space tourist to the International Space Station, to launch something closer to home.  As reported in Edge-Online, Garriott is behind Portalarium, a company looking to make casual games and other apps for social media networks.  Garriott is best known for pioneering RPG and MMO games with his Ultima series.  He last worked on the high-profile but ultimately not widely adopted MMO Tabula Rasa for NC Soft.  His new company spells out a future that expands beyond games.  Edge says Portalarium describes itself as broad based and eventually extending into open learning and open government applications.  Its first offering is not a game, nor an app, nor technically even a product.  The company has launched the Portalarium Player, a free browser-based development kit that allows game makers to port their content seamlessly into social networks such as Facebook.  Garriott said the new venture really takes me back to my roots in the game business, citing smaller teams and budgets needed for the type of projects being pursued.  Read more at Edge-Online {link no longer active}.