The Themis Group is that quiet company behind such web properties as Warcry and The Escapist.  They’re a company that not only specializes in game journalism, but they’ve ended up becoming such authorities in the field, that they’re contracted by massive multiplayer online companies to help with customer service and project management.

Starting today and running through Sunday, the Games Media and Expo (GameX) in Philadelphia will be partnering with The Escapist and the Themis Group to bring Yahtzee Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame) to the United States for his first American press event.

I got a chance to sit down with Alex Macris, CEO of the Themis Group, to see if he could tell us a little more about the company and what’s been happening recently:

• For folks who don’t know you, can you describe your position at Themis? How long have you been with the company? Did you come up with the name for the company, or did you and Tom Kurz just sit around throwing darts at your “Pictures of Naked Girls from Ancient Greece” collection?

I’m Greek by descent and my investors are all Greek, so we wanted a name that drew on Greek mythology. Themis was the Greek goddesss of wise counsel and community affairs. Given our original business model of community management and consulting, she seemed like an appropriate goddess with which to label ourselves. And she’s been good to us. I keep a statue of Themis overlooking the door to my house.

• You’re a CEO of a successful company and you’ve yet to hit 40. How many weeks has it been since someone keyed your car?

I have been lucky enough to not have that happen lately! Please don’t give anyone any ideas.

Sometimes when I interact with some of my employees, who are 24-26 years old, I’m amazed to consider that I was starting Themis at their age. My first job was basically CEO. Kind of wild. I will say that I have been exceptionally fortunate in much of my timing: Fortunate to be able to raise money before the Dot Com Crash, fortunate to start an MMO fansite and online game consultancy just as the second wave of MMOs was launching, and fortunate to make the jump from text to video in 2007, at the sweet spot.

• The marketplace for all-in-one MMO news websites was pretty saturated when Warcry came on the market. Nearly 10 years later, and Warcry is one of the remaining few, and still going pretty strong. Besides the obvious payola to Mob enforcers, to what do you attribute Warcry’s success while so many other sites have fallen by the wayside?

Continuously adapting to changes in the business conditions. When WarCry started, there was no MMO market leader as strong as WoW, and official sites were at a fairly primitive level – UO and AC didn’t even have official message boards, for instance. The focus of WarCry was on providing a community hub for individual games and message boards were our mainstay. A few years later, game official sites were the community hubs, and players had become more focused on getting data to help them play better. Our popular Lineage 2 database drove the site’s success at that time. Nowadays, official sites provide forums, wikis, data, and downloads, so there’s little point in fighting to be the provider of that information; the developer will always win. So now the focus is on helping people pick which MMO they want to play, rather than on helping them play their chosen MMO better.

• Capitalizing on that site’s success, you created The Escapist, which seems to be more of a gold-standard web magazine specializing in multimedia delivery and at least five more industry buzzwords. At what point in the site’s development did you sit back and say: “Damn, I’m Awesome! I should get some sort of web award for this thing!”?

From the outset I think we all believed that The Escapist *could* be awesome but there’s a vast gulf between the potential for excellence and excellence achieved. So actually winning Webby Awards has been very validating.

We had hockey-stick growth from 2007 to the present, and are now reaching millions of people every month. What’s really gratifying is that the growth hasn’t come at the expense of quality. We won the 2008 and 2009 Webby Award for Best Video Game Related Website, and the 2008 People’s Choice Award for Best Video Game Related Website.

• I heard you had some English guy living in Australia doing video reviews for your site. Didn’t the fact that he’s an English guy living in Australia clue you into the probability that he’s a criminal? Besides, how can anyone follow a reviewer that starts out most of his reviews with “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”?

The question is how can anyone follow reviewers who don’t start out their reviews like he does.

I’m excited that The Escapist is the official game media sponsor for GameX, Oct 23-25, in Philadelphia. We’re flying out Yahtzee Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation, for his first-ever American press appearances. I’d also like to mention our Great Stonking Game contest and the 3rd Annual Escapist Film Festival as big events for us this fall.

• Since you started your sites, the internet has gradually changed. Sure, there are still droves of 13 year old boys clamoring for the latest screenshots of “Beach Volleyball 4: The Naked Zombie Boobs,” and you can always bank on that. But as of a few years ago, their parents have suddenly gotten online and spent hours updating their Facebook profile and Twittering about what they bought at the supermarket. Do you see this new audience and technology as affecting a change on how your sites work, or are you just going to ignore those old fogies?

I doubt we’ll begin to offer baby boomer shopping tips on twitter, but it’s not out of any desire to ignore a particular age cohort. We just aim to cover a particular lifestyle, a culture — that of the tech-savvy escapist entertainment enthusiast. Age matters less than interest. There are 50 years old who are quite at home on The Escapist. There are 15 year olds who wouldn’t find it at all interesting.

Social networks can both drive traffic as well as take it away. A Twitter or Facebook link can, for instance, expose you to new audiences. But if your old audiences who used to talk on your forums are now talking on Twitter, that’s traffic you’ve lost. How do you get people to come in via Twitter, but then stay? It’s hard. The way we approach it is to sub-divide the user experience into a series of “engagement points” and then we track how users move from one engagement point to another – so for instance, from reading an article to reading the comments to posting a comment to forwarding their comment to a friend – and then we aim to make each engagement pointy as sticky as possible, wtih minimum friction between points.

• I noticed that you guys took part in a charity event last spring. Care to talk about how that turned out, and what lead you guys toward that sort of an event?

The charity event was called “A Gamer’s Valentine”. Two of our staff, Meghan Murphy and Emily Carter, came up with the idea as a way of raising money for Duke Children’s Hospital. The highlight of the evening was when Michael Capps, president of Epic, won the bidding for Julianne Greer, our editor-in-chief at the time, for some incredibly high sum. They actually just got married. I think this means I can actually say “Themis is all about the love” with a straight face for the rest of my life.