One of the most beautiful games from last year was Journey from developer Thatgamecompany. And now that studio’s art director is off starting his own company.

Matt Nava launched developer Giant Squid yesterday, according to GamesIndustry. Nava previously acted as art director at Thatgamecompany. He’s working with Journey’s Grammy-winning composer, Austin Wintory, and Flow designer Nicholas Clark on the new venture.

“We plan to create innovative and deeply moving games that will inspire players, challenge convention, and push the boundaries of experiential and narrative interactive entertainment into new and unexpected areas,” said Nava.

The Santa Monica-based developer is currently hiring for its first project. According to Nava, the ideal candidate loves playing with Lego and the Angelina Jolie film Hackers.

Nava started at Thatgamecompany in 2008. He oversaw the visuals for both Flower and Journey.

Journey producer Kellee Santiago also left Thatgamecompany in March 2012. She now works on the Android console Ouya as the director of developer relations.

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LAS VEGAS — Jenova Chen got a letter from a 15-year-old girl named Sophia last month. She said that she had played Journey with her father before he died from an illness, and the game had changed her life.

“That letter made it all worth it,” said Jenova Chen, the cofounder of Thatgamecompany, which won game of the year last night for Journey at the DICE Summit. It’s a PlayStation Network downloadable title that’s unique among video games for its poetic ambiance and lack of violence and dialogue.

Chen talked about Sophia’s letter (attached at the end of story) at the close of a talk on emotions in games.

Many participants, like Shuhei Yoshida, the head of Sony’s worldwide game studios, said that Chen’s talk was the highlight of the event and that it was more like an authentic confessional. Chen got a roar of applause when he was finished.

He and his team also got a roar of applause when they won “game of the year” at the game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, the peer-voted DICE Awards.

Journey, like Thatgamecompany’s Flower before it, was a rarity in a game industry full of violent content. The game depicts a being’s lonely journey to the top of a mountain and the spiritual change that takes place along the way. I played the game with my three daughters several times all the way through — something they’ve never done with a PlayStation 3 game (except Flower). Journey has no weapons or words, but it is full of emotion.

Journey’s unique in a business that has every kind of shooter game, but very little content such as romantic comedies, which are so plentiful in movies. The game was all the more remarkable in that it was made in about three years with a team of 13 people; major game projects typically employee a hundred or more.

In his talk and a subsequent interview, Chen revealed that not only is Journey a metaphor for life and death, it is also an apt description of the struggle that Los Angeles-based Thatgamecompany went through. During the process of shipping Journey, Thatgamecompany went bankrupt and had to idle its staff. If the team had shipped on time, they wouldn’t have had a polished game. It was a tough decision to delay it.

Chen said that the team was supposed to ship a year earlier than it did, and it had run out of money. The staff got by on half salaries for six months. When they shipped to Sony in January, the coffers were dry. The company ran out of money, gave everyone three-week vacations, and no one expected to come back.

Chief exec Kellee Santiago (in red) and designer Robin Hunicke (in black) both left the company. Chen stayed on in a minimal capacity. Eight of the company’s 13 employees eventually moved on to do something else.

But the story has a happy ending. Journey went on to become the best-selling PlayStation Network game of all time. Chen doesn’t know for sure, but presumably it will earn royalties. And Mitch Lasky, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, was so moved when he played Journey that he started talks to invest. Thatgamecompany raised $5.5 million, and it committed itself to making cross-platform games that deliver human emotion to a wider audience.

Last night, Chen won the ultimate vindication for delaying the launch of Journey. The company won eight awards out of 11 nominations, including the Best Game Director award for Chen and Game of the Year. We talked to Chen in an interview, and here is an edited transcript of the talk.

GamesBeat: Maybe you want to start with the ending of your talk, with this letter from Sophia and what it made you feel when it arrived.

Jenova Chen: Over the course of last year, we’ve been getting this kind of mail pretty consistently. I was quite moved by it early on. I think there were more than five or six people who’ve lost their family members. They contacted us to talk about how they were reminded of their passed-away family members in the game. By traveling with them, they were able to settle with their grief. Most of the mail was just along the lines of “It’s a wonderful game! I just wanted to tell you how great it is.” But very so often there’s a message that touches me, and I have to write back. I have to share it with everyone who worked on Journey. This happened to be one of the most recent ones. It’s January, so I still remember it.

GamesBeat: Did you have a conversation with her then?

Chen: She’s 15. I wrote back to her. I think my e-mail was probably too theoretical, talking about how it’s not the worst thing, how life will be better. I didn’t hear back from her. I shared the e-mail with Sony, though. A lot of people were moved by it. They wanted to send her a poster or the collector’s edition of the game. I think that’s what happened.

GamesBeat: As you said, that’s exactly the kind of target that you had in mind for the emotional reaction to the game.

Chen: The mission statement of Thatgamecompany, after all these years, is that we want to create timeless interactive entertainment that makes positive changes to the human psyche. If our games can help people, that’s the best reward we can get. Hearing that girl saying the game helped make her life better is all the hard work paying off.

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I have never, ever played a Fable game. I always intended to throw on one of Peter Molyneux’s fantasy epics and take it for a spin, and hey, I still do. Someday. Really.

But the simple fact is this: If you game, you’ve got a pile of shame … that list of titles you haven’t played yet but fully intend to. Someday. Really.

Nobody likes to admit it, but few of us have the money and time to play everything we’re interested in. In fact, the number of missed opportunities just grows and grows as shiny distractions (work, family, newer games that look really cool) come into the picture. So as we come out of the summer doldrums and into a very busy gaming season, we asked some of most influential names in the industry to publicly humiliate themselves by telling us what’s still on their piles of shame.

And they didn’t all answer. But here’s who did.

Cliff Blezinski: former design director, Epic Games (Gears of War)

I’ve yet to go back to Batman: Arkham City because I can’t find the darned disc in my cluttered setup.

Jenova Chen: cofounder, Thatgamecompany (Journey, Flower)

I haven’t played Deus Ex: Human Revolution after the first boss. It’s the game of the year for our lead engineer, John Edwards, so that means a lot. But I haven’t got time to go back to it yet.

Dan “Shoe” Hsu: editor-in-chief, GamesBeat

Mass Effect 2. I don’t understand what all that hub-bub was about the ending to the Mass Effect storyline. We’re still not even halfway through the trilogy, right? Right?

Sigh … yes, this is my big shame game. I’m not even finished with Mass Effect 2 yet. I know it’s something I need to get through — Mass Effect is a major franchise in gaming, after all — but I just can’t seem to find the time. Actually, that’s not true. I somehow scraped together 188 hours for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I honestly don’t know what it is about this series. I loved the first game, but it took me over a year and a half to beat it because I was constantly leaving it, then coming back, and then leaving it again. For all of 2012, ME2′s been sitting next to my TV, beaming subliminal messages to my brain: “Play me … play me. …” But it hasn’t worked. Now that Borderlands 2 is here, and all the other fall games are arriving soon, I’m afraid part two of this sci-fi trilogy will just have to wait a bit longer.

Morgan Webb: co-host, X-Play

Spec Ops: The Line. Everyone tells me it’s really good. Everyone tells me about the crazy tough choices you have to make. And I even bought it. It is still in the plastic and will likely remain so until about January. It’s not a very large pile. I try really hard to keep up with things. And seriously, Shoe needs to play Mass Effect.

Frank O’Connor: franchise development director, 343 Industries (Halo 4)

Working on Halo is a pretty  involved process. There’s the work, of course – story, universe building, endless meetings, travel … most developers know the score there. But you compound that work with home life, raising an angry 3-year-old, taking out the trash, fixing the sewer, making dinner – there just aren’t that many hours in the day. And so when I do play games in my downtime, they tend to be Halo. Take-home tests, matchmaking, just a ton of Halo stuff. So my pile of shame is almost limitless. And to prove that point, my main shameful miss is a couple of years old, and I still haven’t gotten around to it properly. It’s Red Dead Redemption.

Hardly unusual, but when I did finally put it in my drive, I immediately knew this was a place I wanted to inhabit. And I got as far as the first horse race, couldn’t beat Bonnie around her ranch, and that’s where I left it. Right back to Halo stuff. I also have a miserably small completion ratio of Forza, and in fact I have not unlocked the Halo Warthog that’s squirreled away in there. The least dusty, still-shrinkwrapped item on that pile is Borderlands 2.

I still haven’t seen the new Batman, either, and I only saw Cabin in the Woods because it was on my plane. I genuinely feel actual shame because part of my job is to understand why other games are cool and expose myself to new experiences. I feel like I should really just take a couple of months off to reengage and immerse myself in what’s new and what’s awesome.

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Some games are so pretty that they need to make a book about it. Such is the case with Thatgamecompany’s exploration-focused adventure title Journey.

Sony is collaborating with the developer to commemorate Journey’s evocative visual style in a new art book that will release in September. The game’s original art director, Matt Nava, is writing and designing what the team has dubbed The Art of Journey.

Nava littered the tome with pre-production character design, early location sketches, and many works of fan art produced by people who love the game. Additionally, Sony is working with a company call Daqri to produce an augmented reality companion app for the book.

Fans can point their tablets at certain pages to see fully rendered 3D manifestations of in-game models using Darqi’s 4D platform.

After releasing Flow and Flower, Thatgame company had its biggest success when Journey became the fastest-selling title on the PlayStation Network service.

Beginning August 28, Sony will begin selling Journey Collector’s Edition, which will collect all three of Thatgamecompany’s titles on a Blu-ray disc. This is the first time that Flow, Flower, or Journey will ever be available on a piece of physical media. Journey Collector’s Edition will be available at retail for $29.99.

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Thatgamecompany co-founder (and creator of PlayStation 3 adventure Journey) Jenova Chen thinks that most games lack the mature themes and depth required to appeal to adults.

“My biggest complaint for computer games so far is they are not good enough for adults,” Chen told Gamasutra in a recent interview. “For adults to enjoy something, they need to have intellectual stimulation, something that’s related to real life. Playing poker teaches you how to deceive people, and that’s relevant to real life. A headshot with a sniper rifle is not relevant to real life. Games have to be relevant intellectually.”

Gamers and critics alike commended Journey for its ability to stir emotions without relying on traditional storytelling tropes like dialogue. GamesBeat’s review of the PlayStation 3 exclusive called the title, “…an archetypal story of the struggle we go through in life as we tackle any tough mission.” Certainly sounds more relevant to an adult than getting a triple kill with a rocket launcher.

“Can games make you and another human experience an emotion that’s deep enough to touch adults? I’m working on all of that. Making emotional games and making them intellectually relevant, making games where people can connect and come together,” said Chen, who had previously stated that PlayStation Network players are more likely to be interested in artistic games.

Thatgamecompany’s previous titles, Flower and Flow, were also unique, artistic takes on simple game mechanics. The studio is currently working on an unannounced new project.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Journey developer Thatgamecompany, has decided to leave the Santa Monica, Calif.-based game studio that she started with Jenova Chen, according to Gamasutra.

The split is described as an amicable one, and Santiago said it was time for her to move on. That brings to an end one of the most creative and successful collaborations on the artistic side of video games. Journey, the team’s latest effort, went on sale as a downloadable title on the PlayStation Network March 13. The title has already gotten accolades from game critics, including a high rating of 90/100 from GamesBeat. In the non-violent game, the player goes on a solitary journey across the desert to a distant mountain. The visual effects of the wind and sand are beautiful, and the story is told without any words. Journey has been the fastest-selling game in the history of the PSN.

“After doing these three games, I think it was a really great opportunity for all of us to look at what we’ve learned and what I’ve taken from that experience, and go forth and take it into new arenas,” Santiago said.

Gamasutra said other members of the small team may leave as well. Chen has been the creative visionary at the company, and Santiago has helped execute those visions as president. Santiago became famous for a TEDx talk on how video games can be considered art, putting her at odds with move critic Roger Ebert, who didn’t play games but said they can “never be art.” We caught up with Santaigo recently at the Game Developers Conference, where she noted that the experience of making Journey was a tough one.

“So much of my work at Thatgamecompany was really supporting Jenova’s visions for the types of games he wanted to make, and I felt like I have done everything I needed to do there, and that he’s in a great place now to go on and continue with some of the other people at Thatgamecompany, to take that to a whole new height,” Santiago told Gamasutra.

[Update: Robin Hunicke, game designer and another key member of the Journey team, also announced she was leaving to join San Francisco-based Tiny Speck, which makes the online game Glitch].

Gamasutra says a new project has begun at Thatgamecompany. Previous hits include Flow and Flower.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Thatgamecompany’s work has drawn attention because it has avoided violence in games and is steering into emotionally engaging content that very few others in the industry are doing. In doing so, it has become one of the models for innovation among independent game studios.

Santiago gave a TEDx talk in 2010 on how video games can be considered art and was challenged on that assertion by critic Roger Ebert, who said that video games can “never be art.” But judging by the outstanding reviews that Journey is getting, Ebert may have to eat those words.

We caught up with Santiago at the Game Developers Conference this week. Here is a transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: How is your GDC this year?

Kellee Santiago: I helped organize the Indie Games Summit this year, it’s been really great so far. I’ve been happy about that.

Gamesbeat: That seems like a lot of work, a lot of games coming in.

KS: Yeah. I was at TED Active last week too. When the first session started yesterday I thought, “I’m at another conference.” [laughs] “Oh, God.”

GB: I played the game all the way through, and the second time through with my 15-year-old daughter. She remembered Flower.

KS: Oh, wow! Cool.

GB: And my joke was, you know, you guys take too long to make these things. [laughter] Three years to make this one?

KS: Yeah, it’s definitely our biggest endeavor to date. We got up to about 13 people, compared to Flower, which was about seven people over two years.

GB: And it was about three hours, is that the gameplay…?

KS: It kind of depends on what sort of player you are, but I think if you go pretty much straight through the experience, it’s two to three hours.

GB: Is that shorter than Flower? I think I remembered Flower being a little longer.

KS: No, that’s what’s interesting. It depends. I know just anecdotally, people who have e-mailed us and such have said their flower experience was around three to five hours. Whereas I can play through it in 45 minutes. Journey takes me usually about 90 minutes, being the super pro player because I know how to go through it.

GB: So what are you guys thinking of with some of the design, when you target a short amount of time that way? Compared to shooting for a five or ten-hour experience…

KS: Well, there’s a couple of things that factor into the length of play. One is, we do want players to have the ability to go through the entire emotional arc in one sitting, so you can really absorb that whole experience in one sitting if you want to. But also, our goal is really to…

GB: Is that like a trip to the movies?

KS: Kind of. Certainly we borrow a lot from Holllywood film structure. Jenova has spoken in the past about the three-act structure that he tries to implement, and the overall emotional arc as well, of Flower and Journey. But also, we’re really searching for an experience that feels right. It’s such an intangible thing, but the flow of it feels appropriate, the contrast and comparison of the emotions from level to level have a good beat. In that way, it’s sort of evaluating it at the level I would compare to an editor, a book editor or a movie editor, where there’s certainly some ideas in mind about possibly the length of the experience, but really what you’re looking for is almost an intuitive, gut feeling to it. That the beats and the movement from beat to beat make sense. That’s our primary motivating factor. As opposed to just a somewhat arbitrary number like five hours, six hours. For me personally, the first Portal game is a great example of that, where it was maybe a two to three-hour experience, but there was nothing additional. In general, it doesn’t feel like there was anything missing, and there was no excess.

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Your first words when you start playing Journey, the new PlayStation Network game from Thatgamecompany, will be something like “Wow,” or “Cool!” From the moment you start walking through the sand, you know you’re in for a different kind of experience. The sand is mesmerizing, and since there is nothing else to do but walk through it, it captures your full attention.

Journey is the kind of game that has no violence or blood. The combined experience of Journey’s graphics, haunting music, and wordless story is one of the best arguments for classifying video games as a fine art. It is the kind of game that should reach a true mass market and generate an economic bonanza for anyone associated with it.

With Flower, the most beautiful element in the game was the realistically rendered grass that swayed with the wind and gave shape to something that was invisible. In Flower, you as the player were the wind in the dream of a dilapidated flower in the midst of a decaying urban jungle. The wind blew the grass and gave life to dead regions of the world and replaced them with colorful flowers, a process that was as beautiful as when the Wizard of Oz moved from black-and-white images to color as Dorothy arrived in land of the Munchkins.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Incredible visuals

With Journey, the incredible visuals are presented to you right at the outset. You as the player are a robed character, completely masked in a red robe, not entirely human and neither male nor female in your form. In the distance is a mountain. It is split in two at its peak with a beam of light coming out of its middle crevice. It doesn’t seem all that far away, but that is the mirage.

Before you is a vast desert. The sand shimmers and shifts as the wind blows over it. You walk up a dune and leave a ripple of a realistically simulated sand in a wake behind you. You hear the sound of the sand as you stomp through it, and parts of it glitter like gold when the sun shines directly on it. The golden and fluid sand, like the grass in Flower, is the visual star of the show.

The controls are intuitive. You move forward by pushing the left analog stick on the controller and look around with the right stick. There is no time limit. You can proceed at your own pace, discovering how to move by surfing down a sand dune. Hit one button, and you will jump into the air. Hit another, and you will let out a kind of song, spitting out some odd symbols onto the screen as you do.

This is a game that can be played by anybody. It is utterly accessible. It has grand landscapes with fantastic views. As you walk forward, you will find buried buildings or enclosures that house flying ribbons. If you sing to them, they come to life and flow through the air. Little flying carpets give you energy, and you discover that you can use that energy to fly. When the energy runs out, you have to walk again.

So the basic mechanic of the game is to walk through the sand, find the ribbons, gain some energy, and use that to find your next puzzle or reward. The great thing about the game is it is efficient and well designed. The graphics work for the most part, and they don’t get in your way. If you want to speed through the game, you can. If you want to tarry, you can pause as you search the environment.

The story

The story of Journey is one big metaphor. Since there is no dialogue, you have no knowledge of the places you walk through. The ancient ruins you find are a kind of mystery. You unravel some of that mystery as you uncover hieroglyphics on the walls, but that doesn’t seem to tell you much. At the end of each level, you are rewarded with the smiling approval of nun-like or angel-like robed characters. They appear to applaud your efforts and they open the path for you to forge ahead.

But the tale of Journey isn’t just about a walk in the sand. You run into obstacles. There are twists. The environment changes, and sometimes it seems so menacing that you won’t want to go ahead. Howling winds may make you want to stop. The path is a straight one, and you will wonder along the way about what your purpose is. It seems to be a lot like real life in that way: You don’t get an instruction manual for living. You get started moving, and you rarely stop. You overcome obstacles. Everything in Journey seems iconic, mysterious, and spiritual. But you can apply your own narrative on top of it. The beautiful orchestral music sets your mood at various points to be either happy, neutral, or somber.

The music makes your experience into an emotional one. A full orchestra with a chanting singer can lift you up. But as threats come near you, the music gets more menacing. A lone cello plays as you near the final steps of your Journey.

The weather also affects your state of mind. When the first drops of snow land on you, it’s a cool feeling. But when a snowstorm blows in your face, you’ll feel cold on the inside. And when you wander through the darkness, you feel both awe and fear.

How many video game stories can you remember that take you on an emotional path like this game does? It seems game developers rarely remember to stick to the fundamentals of a story arc in their games. Journey’s story seems like it has been stripped of all of the clutter and honed down to the fundamentals. Indeed, the developers of Journey seem to have thrown a lot of things out and come up with a minimalist story and game design. They took out everything except the most valuable part: your feelings as you play the game.

Multiplayer

Journey will be available for multiplayer play as well. Rather than lace up for a combat session, you can get together in the same game world with multiple people and explore it together, talking via headsets. You can discover the hidden history of the ancient world in a unique cooperative play mode with other people who share your experience. You can get through some of the levels faster with multiple people, but that’s not really the point. With a short game, the point of multiplayer is really to make you linger and stay longer in the experience.

[Update: I've been able to play through yet another time with multiple companions along the way. They come and go like spirits, so you don't really know if they're non-player characters or real people. You don't sign up to get a multiplayer partner. The others just appear in your game. All you can do to communicate is sing to each other. But the emotion of the game changes when someone else arrives. You're delighted that you aren't on your journey alone. And for the most part, the other players help you play better. But at one juncture, the other player did something that prevented me from moving up to grab a resource. That was a little frustrating. But it didn't affect my ability to move forward. At the end of the multiplayer session, the game tells you the names (or PlayStation Network handles) of the companions you met along the way.]

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Time management problem

I have a bone to pick with Thatgamecompany. They work too slow. Come on! Such lazy developers. They came out with Flower, one of the most startling and original video games ever made — with a story as beautiful as Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (the book, not the movie) — and then they sit around and do nothing for three years.

Now they’ve launched Journey. It’s a short three-hour experience available for $14.99 on the PlayStation Network. It’s another spectacularly innovative game. And now they’re probably going to sit on their butts for another three years. Speed it up, will ya! You guys are doing the most original work in gaming on any platform. We can’t wait that long for your next game.

I jest, of course. Journey is an incredible video game, produced by a small team with about 11 developers — led by Kellee Santiago, Jenova Chen (pictured) Robin Hunicke and others.

And yes, this is kind of a long way of saying that there isn’t much to dislike about Journey. The game isn’t for those among us who have been trained by years of experience to kill, maim, and tackle. If that’s what you want to do in video games, then you probably don’t have the patience for Journey. It’s also likely to be somewhat disappointing for those who simply want to know what is at the end of the Journey. The game is for people who want to explore and experience interesting things along the way.

The team ran with this idea, and they probably pursued it to a fault. There aren’t a lot of things you can do in Journey. It is a very linear experience,

where you go from one place to another in a pretty straight line. After all, you can always seen the mountain in the distance, so you always know which way to go. Even if you wanted to linger, there isn’t a lot for you to interact with. It almost seems as if the creators of Journey forgot that they could vary the story and leave you in more of an open world where you simply wander around. You can do that now, but it doesn’t seem like you can find much to do.

Journey’s creators at Thatgamecompany previously created Flow, Flower, and now Journey. The company was founded in 2006 by graduates of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Flow debuted in 2007 on the PlayStation Network, and Flower debuted in 2009.

The studio’s game designers view the lack of violence as “de-empowering” the player. You feel helpless and tiny and all alone. The world makes you feel a sense of awe, wonder, and fear. If there is anything wrong with the game, it would have to be that the experience is kind of short. You can breeze right through it in about three hours. You’ll probably want to play it again, and it is a great game to play through with children of any age.

CONCLUSION

Journey is an archetypal story of the struggle we go through in life as we tackle any tough mission. You start out fresh, and your goal is formidable, but it’s not so far away. Then you find there are twists and turns, and the journey takes its toll on you. The game evokes an incredible amount of emotion from you, and it is the kind of game that its fans will play over and over. To employ a trite but true maxim, the Journey is the reward. The game is an amazing accomplishment in an industry that is focused on creating blockbusters with a $50 million budget. If it has a flaw, it is that the game is too short. But at least the developers at Thatgamecompany leave you wanting more.

Score: 90/100

Journey will be released on March 13, 2012, exclusively for the PlayStation 3 via download on the PlayStation Network. A downloadable code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There’s a specter hanging over the traditional video game industry, and you can see it in the image above. Social game companies such as Zynga and mobile games on the iPhone are grabbing players by the tens of millions. The traditional video game industry isn’t growing like it once was.

But the star designers of traditional games aren’t running scared. In a panel at the Dice Summit, which gathers 700 of the game industry’s elite in Las Vegas from today through Friday, game industry veterans said that they’re used to the constant chaos, change, and adaptation that has to happen in the industry. Companies such as Zynga, maker of CityVille, and Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, have disrupted the game industry and the industry veterans think that’s a good thing.

The game veterans pictured above said they continue to work on hardcore console and PC games that they always have. But they’re playing games from the new guys. As a group, these game designers are looking to learn what they can from social and mobile.

The social and mobile game companies are crashing the party at Dice and at the larger Game Developers Conference coming in San Francisco later this month. But it was still surprising to see a panel with no social and mobile game makers sing the praises of that new segment of the game industry.

Mike Morhaime (pictured right), head of Blizzard Entertainment, said he plays Words With Friends, a Scrabble-like word game on the iPhone, so that he can connect with old friends.

Greg Zeschuk (far right), co-founder of Electronic Arts’ BioWare division, said he pulled someone into his office to show off CityVille on Facebook. “Come take a look at the future of games,” he said. He said game designers can now reach so many users so fast with games that are accessible and easy to play; CityVille grew to 100 million users in less than two months on Facebook.

“We have never had a chance to reach so many people so fast with something so easy to play,” Zeschuk said.

Bruce Shelley,  co-founder of the now-defunct Ensemble Studios and maker of Age of Empires, was so enthralled with Zynga’s FrontierVille (made by his friend and game veteran Brian Reynolds) that he decided to start work on Facebook games himself.

“This [game] had engagement,” said Shelley (pictured right). “It was a real game. It meant that game design had been brought to a new space where it had never reached before.”

Shelley is now a contractor working on a game design project with Zynga. He is offering tips to Zynga’s neophyte game makers, who in turn are offering him tips about how to operate in the fast game design cycles that Zynga follows.

Shelley co-founded his game studio in 1995, a great time to get an independent game studio together to make high-end PC or console games.

“I thought you would never be able to do that again,” he said. “But today, there has never been a better time to start a game studio. I have this vision of a dam breaking and all of this opportunity rushing downhill.”

Now at Zynga, Shelley said it is remarkable how fast the company can move. “I’m just asked to make the games more fun,” he said.

Mark Cerny (pictured right), a freelance game designer who has worked on many blockbuster games with Sony, said, “Bruce will be able to create a game faster than it will take us to get a lawyer assigned to create a contract.”

Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare, said that the game industry feels like it is in the middle of an S-shaped curve, meaning it’s about to see another huge wave of growth.

“A lot of existing players are going to have to adapt in order to thrive and survive,” he said. “New players are going to come into this market and surprise the heck out of us.” However, Muzyka also said it was still refreshing to see outstanding hardcore games surface, such as RockStar Games’ Red Dead Redemption, an epic Western game that has sold 8 million units on the consoles.

Cerny said he was happy to see original indie games such as Flower, a downloadable game on the PlayStation 3 that let gamers play the wind in the dream of a flower in the middle of a dilapidated city. Games like that one aren’t huge money makers, but they earn enough to make their money back and more.