Science in the Triangle

Russ Pitts finds it hard to remember a time when he wasn’t playing video games.

From the Magnavox Odyssey to the Fairchild Channel F, Pitts embraced gaming as a kid in the 70s — and he hasn’t let go since.

“My whole childhood was filtered through this lens of games,” Pitts said.

That’s why it’s not a big surprise that Pitts is now at the helm of The Escapist, an online gaming magazine based in Durham. Now approaching its sixth-year anniversary, The Escapist competes for gamers’ attention with heavy hitters like IGN and Gamespot. Both sites — and others like them — are filled with reviews, walkthroughs and trailers to guide gaming consumers.

“Our challenge has been trying to find our footing as we grow to the size of these gargantuan companies,” Pitts said. “Our success has put us toe-to-toe with some of these giants.”

But The Escapist has a different strategy.

“When we first built The Escapist, it wasn’t about covering games as products,” Pitts said. “It’s about covering games as experiences.”

They do that through a collection of original video series and feature stories — along with staple gaming criticism. But there’s also plenty of other coverage of the rest of geek culture, from Dungeons and Dragons to sci-fi and fantasy film.

And there’s evidence their tact is working.

This May, the magazine took home three Webbys, coveted awards for the best content on the Internet. For the staff at The Escapist, the recognition isn’t terribly new; it beat out other contenders like Gamespot, Destructoid and Wired’s GameLife for the top spot in the games-related category in 2009 and 2008. But this year, it was the first gaming website to nab the nomination for best lifestyle site — pitting the magazine against the likes of Martha Stewart.

Although The Escapist lost the Webby itself to the knitting, cooking, decorating convicted felon, it did win something else no other gaming website has — the People’s Voice award for the lifestyle category.

“I can’t imagine a higher honor,” Pitts said.

‘THE BIG SHIFT’

Pitts and his staff value their new award for more than just bragging rights. For them, it’s validation: gaming as a hobby is now just as recognizable as sewing or spending time in the kitchen.

“The mass recognition of gaming as a worthy pursuit is definitely nice,” Pitts said. “At one point, a ‘gamer’ was not something one could admit to being without a stigma attached.”

But Pitts points out that it wasn’t really the mainstream attitude toward gaming that changed.

“The suggestion that all the sudden now, at this point in the history of man, everyone is playing games is a misnomer,” he said. “People have always played games.”

Growing up in Texas, his family hunted, fished and hiked — but they were also gamers, spending hours at the tabletop playing dominoes together.

“The big shift has less to do with games than the fusion of technology in our lives,” Pitts said.

That change didn’t happen overnight. Alex Macris, president and CEO of Escapist publisher Themis Media, traces these shifting societal attitudes toward geek culture at large to the dot-com bubble in the late 90s, when tech-savvy entrepreneurs made stacks of cash starting web-based companies.

“Things that are cool are things that get you rich really fast,” Macris said while lounging on a couch at The Escapist‘s booth at the East Coast Game Conference in mid-April. “For the first time, you had geeks be able to be rock stars.”

The bubble may have burst, but the initial sentiment toward technology not only remained, but grew over the years.

“When technology became a sign of wealth and success, technology became cool,” he said.

SEEKING BALANCE

The expanding appeal of geek culture, especially as it applies to gaming, isn’t hard to spot. Of the 10 top-selling titles in 2011, according to VGChartz, four are targeted toward casual gamers. Three of them — Wii Sports, Kinect Adventures! and Wii Sports Resort — have even cracked the top-five spots, selling more than 2 million copies each. That widening audience of players who would have never considered themselves to be gamers is tempting — especially to a growing online magazine hungry for page views.

“We know now we are not just talking to the hardcore gamers,” Pitts said. “We can reach practically everyone because practically everyone plays games. But we do have an audience.”

In his two years as editor-in-chief, Pitts said he’s worked to make sure his magazine doesn’t lose sight of that core audience of gamers. That’s why the series in The Escapist‘s repertoire discuss topics like what games mean to society and how they function as art. Even their most popular series, Zero Punctuation, pairs reviews with original animation, low-brow humor and scathing commentary on the problems with games and the industry at large.

“Underneath the potty humor and the dick jokes, there’s a really high level of games criticism,” Pitts said.

Of course, it helps that the team members behind the content know what they’re talking about. Pitts said his crew was carefully assembled based on a common love of gaming (there’s even a running joke around the Durham office that Macris co-founded Themis Media to recruit more players for his D&D campaigns). Their guiding vision is to dig deep into what gaming means to players and how it shapes them — much like any other hobby would.

“We started The Escapist with the idea that gaming is a lifestyle for this generation like music was for the Rolling Stone generation,” Macris said.

And for the staff, Pitts said confirmation of that founding principle in the form of a People’s Voice award is an invaluable thing.

“It’s a validation of all the blood, sweat and tears we put into this thing,” Pitts said. “What keeps us all here is this belief that it matters somehow.”