Greetings, Adventurers!
Get to know some of your fellow Adventurers throughout Community Convergence. Our second profile spotlights the Utopian Organ, an online newspaper dedicated to a group of players’ lives in Aeternum. The site covers guides, fashion, builds, news, and Mutations with some fun extras like the Agony Aunt advice column and Classifieds section. Here’s the story behind Newworldnews.org.
Behind the Organ
“I'm Landi and I play on the Delos server with my husband, Narokstar, and daughter, Playlish (Lish for short),” Landi said. “We all work together on ideas for the site. Lish and I do most of the writing, while Narok streams on Twitch. We encourage contributions from our company, Don't Die Alone, and feature content written by the following Delosians: CheeseGX, Zelus, Moon, A. Bacon, sirvulcan, ABYZZMOS, Jeigo, CV Turner, and Meddikk. One of our most useful articles, the New World FAQ, was created and is maintained by Geofgivens from El Dorado. We also have a guest article on rare furniture written by Eirill from the Nyssa server.”
“The Utopian Organ is the brainchild of Lish and myself. We wanted to make something fun and talked about it for quite a while, until Lish pressured me into finally buying a domain name and web hosting. It was originally meant for fashion and furniture features, which we have sadly neglected but hope to get back to soon.”
“We have a lot of ideas but don’t often turn them into reality. There’s a puzzle clue in the Classifieds that refers to this.”
Forging Bonds and Meaning
“It's also a fun project for my daughter and I to bond over. Playing a journalist and collecting stories and pictures enhances our gaming experience. Getting other people involved really makes it feel like we're doing something more meaningful, and we love every piece of content that has been contributed.“
“Ultimately, we want people to see the depth that online worlds have to offer. As well as the game mechanics, quests, battles, etc., there's an underlying community of player interactions. We would really like the site to be a place to showcase that community. While we're open to article idea submissions and have forms for builds, classifieds, and transmog, it's sometimes harder to network with larger pools of people. For example, I'd love to have a war correspondent and articles about the politics of war companies. It's not something we're involved with, but it sounds fascinating.“
A Name at the Center of the Community
“The name is based on the Utopia server, which we still miss. The organ element is a bit controversial and really took a lot of persuasion from Lish for me to accept it. Obviously, the first organ that comes to mind is the heart, which places us at the center of the community. However, other people seemed to get a different idea about the name, so after a year we purchased the newworldnews.org domain name to convey the connection to the game and provide a more sanitized link to share.”
“Utopian Organ makes the initials UO, just like Ultima Online, which is the game my husband and I met in about a quarter of a century ago. We lived on opposite sides of the country, but we ended up moving to the same city, getting married and having kids. So, gaming has impacted our lives significantly, and we wanted to honor that in this current chapter.”
An ‘Olde Worlde’ Vibe
“There are so many videos out there but not a lot of good websites. We liked the idea of an ‘olde worlde’ vibe, even to the point of doing the unthinkable and using a serif font for the body text. While videos are great for passive entertainment, we feel like information is best provided with words and still images, so you can absorb it at your own pace. We are branching into a little bit of video in our articles though to cater to a more diverse audience.”
Get the Look Series
“We love our Get the Look series of articles. Originally, we would take screenshots of random players' outfits and then try to recreate them. This was quite a lot of detective work, but heaps of fun. Recently, we changed it to a more consensual model that receives information from the owner of the outfit and includes a gallery of posed portraits.”
Because of our love for fashion, we spent a lot of time saving the Armor Catalog when the official forums closed and have all the images that were posted. It was a huge undertaking. We haven’t followed up with updating it, since there are other sites with good transmog databases now. It is nice to have the history though. If anyone started contributing submissions, we would add them.“
The Future of the Utopian Organ
“We don't make any money from the site, so it's purely a passion project. We get some satisfaction from seeing how much we've created, and almost as a journal of our lives in New World. When you play a game daily, even if it's only evenings, it forms a large part of your reality. So, I guess for me, it’s a way to express my experiences creatively.”
“We would like to get more people involved and have a diverse range of viewpoints and articles. We definitely want to get into making more furniture and fashion features. I'm also in the process of updating the Mutation Rotation templates to make them more factual and functional. We're excited to find out what will happen after the big announcement in June and hope to have lots of new material to write about.“
Look forward to more articles on all things New World from the Utopian Organ in the future. You can also submit your ideas to contribute through the form towards the bottom of their homepage. Thanks for your support and we’ll see you in Aeternum!