Topical Tuesday - What The Escapist Means to You Contest

[Jaranja]

The best way I can describe the Escapist is as a safe haven: with all the evil that the internet contains, this continues to be a glowing beacon in a dark cave. I've been here for about a year now and this site has never once got boring. There's always something here that keeps you wanting to get back onto it.

I'll start by saying that the videos section of the website is incredibly. Whilst there are some, in my opinion, awful series' there are so many good ones that finish, and are replaced by even better ones. Even though it's difficult to find any good series' on the internet, the Escapist always seems to have the top dogs, in terms of quality.

Secondly, the forums. What can I say? This is where the Escapist shines brightest from the Gaming Discussions all the way to Religion and Politics. Almost everyone here seems to have a firm grasp of what grammar is, with a mixture of proper manners and a lot to say. This is why the Escapist is different from nearly all of the other gaming sites you could go to.

Finally, I'd like to congratulate the staff on being consistently good at their job. 99% of bans, suspensions and probations are correct in every way and we couldn't ask for a better security team. The reviews have always been of very high quality and, usually, voice what I thought about the game anyway.

To conclude, everything about this site is incredible and what I have said in the above essay doesn't even scratch the surface of what this place means to me. The community, the staff and the rest of the contributors, whether they be video or article contributors, come together to make one amazing site.

 

[Heart of Darkness]

Three hundred words precisely.

"The mouthpiece of the gaming generation..."

A phrase that is often repeated loses its essence. As its meaning fades over time, so do its substance and its presence, until nothing more than a husk remains as it slowly shambles through the public vernacular. Without life, phrases are just meaningless words; but when a phrase manages to retain its essence long after its conception, it manages to avoid eventual zombiefication and transcends as something greater - a gospel, an icon.

The above quote can be surmised as the entire essence of The Escapist, and - five years after its birth - that essence is still going strong. Rather than be strictly another news outlet or review mill, The Escapist has embraced its forums and its userbase as a part of its features, not simply as a consequence of adding a comments section to an article. Users are encouraged to actively engage with the material on site, giving it something that other media outlets always seem to lack: life. This life, in turn, creates an atmosphere that is inviting to all, but not afraid to be brutally honest when necessary.

But The Escapist is not, like many of its users claim, "the last bastion of intelligence on the Internet." With a great userbase comes great responsibility, and often, it leads to the worst that the Internet can breed: hate, elitism, flaming. Despite this, however, The Escapist still strives to encompass the many walks of gaming - not to endlessly appease its users, but to ensure that no one is left behind.

Elitist, casual, fanboy, troll. We are all gamers. The Escapist is not just our mouthpiece: it is the embodiment of our hate, our love, our passion and pride for gaming. The Escapist is the gaming generation. The Escapist is us. We are The Escapist.

 

[Senmurv]

"'The Escapist' is a free site on the internet . . . and I'm voluntarily paying for it." This thought occurred to me as I clicked the final payment button, securing my membership in the Escapist Publisher's club for a full year. Up until that point I really hadn't considered what I was doing-- it was only a natural output of the enjoyment the site brought me. However, it really got me thinking about just why I would shell out my hard-earned cash so readily.

I found the site (like many) through "Zero Punctuation" and stayed because I had found a fountain of mature, interesting, and accurate gaming information. While some sites would get information "first," the Escapist would get it RIGHT; with a heart and spirit that few gamers could help but identify with. Every day, I am greeted with a feast of nerdy news and updates that I never knew I needed to read. Add to that the immensely entertaining videos from "Unskippable," "Escape to the Movies," and "Rebecca Mayes Muses" and you have the only site I constantly namedrop among gaming crowds.

Lord knows, I'm not a rich woman-- I have to budget what I do spend on my entertainment, and this may seem counter-intuitive to spending even a small amount on something I could have for free. However, I believe in supporting "The Escapist," I am, in a small way, supporting that lifestyle I wholeheartedly embrace: that of a die-hard gamer. We are not alone in the world-- there are people who think just like we do and they want to share things with us. If my contribution can add another brick to that worthy structure, than I feel I have accomplished something of substance. Please continue to shine!

 

[TG MLPDashie]

The Escapist has been a home to me because it's where i can go to have a laugh, Yahtzee's rants and abusing games is good to watch, as well as all the other fabulous shows, ENN, UNSkippable, Doomsday Arcade ect; it's also fun to talk to others about all sorts of things and to have a good laugh with them all. im not a good writer/typer so i'm just going to finish off with saying that i love the escapist and everyone on it and hope it never leaves.

Matthew Wyatt

 

[Mr.Pandah]

When I wake up in the morning, groggy, grumpy, some other word that starts with gr, I always roll over to my computer to see what is going on with The Escapist. The Escapist isn?t just about Zero Punctuation though. It is so much more than that to me now. I?ve spent over 2 years now with The Escapist and since the beginning, I have done nothing but grow closer and more fond to this community and website.

What seems like a lifetime ago already, I simply came to this website for that foul-mouthed British fellow. After watching nearly all of his videos, I began exploring the rest of the website. I found a plethora of things to do. There were actual articles with points to be made and discussed. There were forums with people who seem to have a decent grasp on reality and their sole purpose was not to flame one another. I dabbled in User Reviews over my career, garnering nearly no recognition, but damn did it feel good getting some real feedback. I?ve seen just about everything The Escapist has to offer, yet I?m still not gone. Something about this website just keeps me coming back.

If there was a way to explain exactly what The Escapist means to me, one word only comes to mind. Home(page). I?ve never visited another gaming related website as much as this one. But The Escapist continues to prove itself to be more than just a gaming website. It has so much more to offer that if you haven?t moved on past Zero Punctuation, I ask you, no, I demand that you try out what The Escapist truly has to offer to you. Congratulations Escapist, I look forward to many more years with you and your excellence. *Air Guitars*

-William Neuendorf (I hope my name doesn't count, because than I'm a word over )

 

[Nannernade]

When I think of The Escapist, I think of all the great things it has brought to me in the past, great articles that were very well thought out, informational, and interesting. It also brings funny videos that pertain to common knowledge to the gamer community or people or the like.

The Escapist can bring out the best, and the worst of people, the randomness, the emotional, the aggressive and of course, the knowledgeable. The Escapist brings hope back to the internet, that there will always be a voice to the people, to help us turn a rough day into a great day. Giving you information on upcoming games, tips and tricks, interesting information about a game that has gone down in history as a great game, it never seizes to amaze me of all the great content featured on The Escapist.

As The Escapist hits the 5th Anniversary I say congratulations Escapist, you have earned it and keep up the great work, I can't wait until the 6th Anniversary and so on.

- Nannernade

 

[VondeVon]

For me, The Escapist Is a place of zen. Nothing helps me unwind and recharge better than twenty minutes (or more) on this website.

The videos are both a fantastic pick-me-up when I'm feeling down and a source of useful information. (Movie Bob, I'm looking at you. Yahtzee, you can always be relied upon to make my expectations low enough that I'm then pleasantly surprised!)

The sheer energy and passion shown by the people here is invigorating. Their creativity and cleverness is exhilarating.

Everyone would like to claim that their forums generate a "community atmosphere", but here I've always felt more like one of a thousand family members.
I may not know most of you, but I'd like to.

 

[LevelSix]

To me, the Escapist is acceptance. The gaming community has been under attack since its earliest days. Accusations are hurled at us, stereotypes wrongfully brandished, and blame cast on us; an easy scapegoat for the masses of confused individuals looking to place blame anywhere but on themselves.
We gamers are not the harbingers of doom many believe us to be. A controller is not a weapon, video games do not train us to kill, and we are a productive part of society. The Escapist is proof of these facts. Gamers have united and work as part of an industry they love.
The Escapist invites other gamers to further prove these facts. Articles cleverly written, reviews painstakingly detailed, and videos with hours of production time, all with the common theme of gaming are open for the world to see the passion we share. Role-players need not be harassed for discussing their latest adventure. Shooter enthusiasts can compare strategy and swap war stories. Everyone in-between can also find their place in the Escapists forums.
To be part of the Escapist is to be proud to be a gamer. It is a step towards showing the world that you are not ashamed of your hobby. With the work of the Escapist, the world is shown that our hobby is as valid as any other. United we are strong, divided we will fall. At the Escapist, we are united. At The Escapist, we are accepted, and embraced.

 

[s_glasgow99]

The Escapist to me is an ongoing examination of our eternal quest for extra-physical enjoyment. This could be through playing video games, connecting to a character and vicariously living through a movie or book, or diving into the head of a dungeon master and taking on the character you've created with mere dice roles.
The Escapist takes on topics that to the layman may appear as 'nerdy' or 'for geeks' but actually examine what interests everyone, an escape from normality, or simply just the world around us.
Every week there are articles that talk about how gaming has effected them personally. How the very act of living through an onscreen character helps them get through a monotonous nine-to-five.
To me, the Escapist is a place that can help me fully appreciate these worlds others have created, and inspire me to create my own.

- Scott Glasgow

 

[Lost In The Void]

[HEADING=1]The Escapist[/HEADING]

By: Lost in the Void

It is rare that we find something that we truly enjoy, even rarer if it becomes something that doesn?t decline in time. I have found this in the Escapist. It is difficult to pin down the exact reason that this site has done so much in my eyes, and even harder still to point out my favourite parts of it. The videos and articles are what entertain me on slow days, full of interesting new and opinions; they make for an interesting read every day.

The forums are a mixed bag for me. I usually avoid the Off-Topic and Gaming Boards, but have found well written stories on the RP Boards, enjoyable forum games and interesting RPs to interact with. To say that this board has increased both my writing and creative thinking would be selling it short indeed. In fact this board has kept my writing from deteriorating over the summer, while I am out of college. User Reviews are in the same boat as RP, constantly making for excellent entertainment and thought provoking opinions, or at the least, a good gauge of whether the product is worth purchasing.

Of course there is one thing that must stand above the others, something that truly separates this site from others. This would be the closeness I feel with many members of the community. The community has its faults, but as a whole flows well together, making for an interesting mix of different races, faiths and beliefs that allow for a better understanding of the world. The friends I have made from this site will hopefully stay with me throughout the years as they truly are the best part of this site. The frills of the site are what draw us; it is the community that keeps us.

 

[Amsus]

My submission:
The escapist is many things. You can put yourself in there and debate in first person on the forums. You can receive an overhead tactical view of things from the publisher's notes. You can sit back and laugh at stupid cutscenes and groan in anger along with Yahtzee over quick time events. You can enjoy the third person carnage as Shamus and Critical Miss snap shoot your favorite games to ridicule. You can find out what class of escapist you are through the quizzes and level up your profile with badges. You can grow smarter as the weekly columns hack and slash their way through the nonsense of the gaming world. You can explore the world of gaming by playing around in the magazine. Or you can just casually click about there every once in a while to catch the news and a review.
Regardless of which parts of it you play with it all amounts to time spent. We can dress it up by pointing out that the way the magazine includes you through comments, forums, quizzes, contests, achievements, badges and even an actual game makes it interactively unique. Or we can make it noble by pointing out that the interactivity, the relevance and the modernity make it a way of art in itself. But in our hearts we know that it all boils down to the fact that it's a fun thing to do.
It is, like the games it portrays, more than meets the eye, but that's not why we like it is it? We stay because it's fun and engaging. That might make it pointless fun, but you know what? That's really all it needs to be. What makes it great is, that it is more.

 

[Phantomess]

My entry - a bit short, but nonetheless an entry:


I am a proud Escapee.

Everyday at work, I am forced to face the absolute atrocity that is my hometown's low-level brain capacity, something I lament could be spreading throughout the rest of the world. This very morning I suggested we put a sign out the front that read ?Low-level reading ability required for full service enjoyment?.

(Sadly, my boss didn't take me up on the offer. Pity. I always wanted to be inside a Pokemon game.)

It's nice to know that not everywhere on this soggy rock is this stupid (or this unimaginative). What is the Escapist to me? It's a place for intelligent (and sometimes not so intelligent) conversation, technological journalism, entertaining videos and a muster-point for all those who feel passionately about our chosen past-time. The Escapist is CNN with a sense of irony and dark humour, a committed band of renegades standing up in this overly politically-correct world, looking around and saying ?This is stupid. We're outta here?.

For what is gaming if not freedom, playtime, escapism? The website is just that: Escapism materialised in a spectacular police box shape and awesome whoosh- wait, that's the TARDIS.

Oh well, I'll just settle for generally frickin' awesome.

 

[blankedboy]

Why do we need to use our real name and not, say, a pen name?

Or better yet, a pseudonym. Speaking of which, if I ever manage to save my dying idea for an epic series of books that I discontinued about quarterway through, I'll use a pseudonym because Eddie Linton isn't a very welcoming name for a book cover. It just doesn't look right.
Who agrees?

 

[ben_toon]

My submission, thanks:

I am sure I am not alone in that I only started reading this site after an accidental stumble across Zero Punctuation's videos. The Escapist is a good gaming read every week that offers something different from the norm.
Other websites have features and editorials so it was not obvious to me how the escapist had a different format. Infact the format doesn't interest me; essentially all that matters is the quality and more relevantly the originality of the content. Games websites are often obsessed with graphics, hype and most of all scores; every game must have a definitive, objective rating. If two games are compared by the games media it is usually to decide which one is objectively better, not to discuss the merits and differences between the two. In reality every person reacts to a game differently as the merits are subjective, is it not better to simply describe what each game contains and how it is done and let the reader decide whether it will sit them?
However, the Escapist's articles are so interesting to me because they usually eschew this culture and instead focus on individual, diverse opinions that encourage thought and debate. Articles on this site reflect this reality; they don't claim to represent everyone but often a biased singular view. Other articles look at specific aspects of genres, control schemes or narrative. However, the approach in these articles is again not about scoring games but discussing how they do things and if/why the methods work.
Of course there are review scores to be had on this website but if I'm honest I don't read them. I read the website for everything written that isn't about giving a score. The Escapist means to me this unique content that currently only it provides.

 

[Bloodstain]

Okay, let me try...

[hr]What does The Escapist mean to me?

by
Julian Kiefer[hr]​

What does The Escapist mean to me?

It means a lot to me. But first of all, a short summary of how I became part of one of the - in my opinion - most precious communities:
Like many others before, I found out about The Escapist thanks to Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation, a well-known series of game reviews with dark humour. And for quite a while, this was all that interested me; I didn't see what else The Escapist had up its sleeve. Gradually, I discovered more: Other video series like Unskippable, the very interesting Weekly Issues (a compilation of articles to a different topic), the latest news and, of course: The forums with its great community.

Which brings me back to the main question.
The Escapist means a whole lot of different things to me. When watching videos, it means having fun. When reading articles, it means broadening my horizon. When browsing through news, it means being informed about what is going on in our world. And most important: When participating in the forums and writing messages to other users, when holding heated debates, when recognizing somebody over and over again, when meeting new faces and old acquaintances, it means belonging to an open-minded, intelligent community, to interact with like-minded people, to laugh, to think, to be home. And that's something you rarely find on the internet.

All in all, to me, The Escapist means being happy. That's why I proudly call it my home.

[The end]
[hr]

Well, that went quite good, I guess.

 

[Sonofadiddly]

It's still 11:48 PM July 20th where I live! Commence entry:


The Escapist was revealed to me in a predictable fashion?a single link to something called ?Zero Punctuation,? posted by some jerk I didn?t know onto a friend?s Facebook page. I no longer remember what compelled me to click that link to a video review of a game I hadn?t played. Boredom? Self-loathing? But this essay isn?t about Zero Punctuation. While Yahtzee?s rants supplied me with endless joy, at least until the list of reviews ended, the piece of The Escapist that truly astonished me was ?Unskippable.?

Again, what was it that inspired me to watch this video series out of all others? Fate. As I listened to a pair of couch nerds make fun of the terrible writing of Devil May Cry 4, I knew that the impossible was indeed possible. My dreams were within reach. A whole new world of inspiration opened up before me. People could actually make money by sitting around and making fun of cut scenes!

I?d been doing it for free!

And so, what The Escapist means to me is the greatest gift of all: hope. Hope for a future in which I could make a career out of doing what I do best, what delights me more than the fresh smell of a new video game instruction manual right out of the box. Video reviews, web comics, whatever Unskippable is supposed to be?someday I, too, will build my life around the mockery of that which I love. I will live to make fun of video games, and with every Paypal donation I receive on my pitiful blog website, I will whisper the name of that which gave me hope: The Escapist.

 

[Spinwhiz]

Thank you to everyone who created a submission! We are now going through the process to pick the winner, so please be patient. We will let the winner know and post in this thread in the near future.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

I am an Escapist. You are an Escapist. Hell, everyone in the world is practically an Escapist, because we rely mainly on books, movies, gaming, and sports to make ourselves feel more comfortable and provide us with a way to kill time and frustration. Even if it means defocusing your eyes in your favorite game of choice so that all the enemies are your boss. Yet there are so few places on the internet that feel like a safe haven, and the Escapist is that place.

I am an Escapist, and so is everyone else here. We escape to a kinder, more welcoming community kept in charge by a bunch of "harsh but fair" moderators that, in stark comparison to /b/, the WoW boards, and (where I came from before I came here) GameTrailers, feels like home. And no other website I've been to so far manages to match the magnitude the Escapist has had on me.

It's not just the forums, or Zero Punctuation, or Unforgotten Realms (you won't be forgotten that's for sure.), or the articles, it's everything. I can discuss religous and political subjects with the community and learn a lot, and then the next minute, discuss gaming and other off-topic goofiness, and kick back and watch ZP on the same day. It's on its own, a world free from trolls, xenophobes, and screechy 12 year olds, and it feels like a real investment of time when I'm on the internet as opposed to randomly browsing. And if all the community were here in front of me, right now, I would probably give them all a great big hug.

Thanks a lot Escapist.

 

[Deofuta]

Nice essay! Although I must regretfully inform you that you missed the deadline, see the post above you.

 

[Jumplion]

Good luck to everyone!

[sup]specifically me, but whatever, good luck to everyone regardless.[/sup]