RllmukFM's Modcast becomes GamerDork's DorkCast

GAMES

So yeah, we're a bit - okay, very late with the praise and plugging...okay, being the Games Ed I guess I'm very late with the praise and plugging, but my delay isn't without reason. For those of you who don't know, Rllmukfm is a webby radio station thing with contributions from a number of members of rllmukforum - a community Disposable Media owe a lot to, as it helped get DM off the ground before it blossomed into the mag/site/blog hybrid you know and (hopefully) love. Since we owe a debt to the forum, we're always looking for news about forum creativity outside of our own (such as the Umami post I made back in February), and I've personally been enjoying ModCast/Gamerdork for quite some time since it's debut, so I feel I've always owed it a mention here.

The show started out as an unscripted roundtable talk with, well, anyone who cared to spare an hour or so chatting about the games they've been playing, or the news that's been interesting them; the theory being that these random subjects would blossom into emergent discussion about other stuff and keep a nice discussion flowing for a sizeable length of time. A bit like DM's "never again" Halo 2 feature, where hours of MSN chatter had to be hacked down into standard feature size. But enough about our embarrassments. *blush*

I've always said that the best and worst games are the easiest to critique, because you get so worked up about how amazing/shit the game in question is that you can rant or rave for ages, picking out everything that makes the game good or bad and filling up tons of space. The more something bugs you, pushes your buttons in a good or bad way, the more inclined you are to go on at length about how you feel about it, and this is what made the unplanned format of the older Modcasts so successful. You could write a transcript of a Modcast, take all the opiniony bits and write them on a blogspot and you'd have a fairly decent opinion site, but that's not what it's about. It humanises the experience, delivers personal anecdotes that spin-off into other sub-discussions, and is always involving.

And that last bit is perhaps what makes it so brilliant - you can listen to Dorkcast and laugh with the hosts; you feel like they see their fanbase as their listeners, rather than as a few more hits that they can brag about. Don't get me wrong; all mediums have their pros and cons, and I'm not saying that PDF editors should stop doing what they're doing and instead set up a podcast (not least because, regardless of medium, a badly-expressed opinion will lose you fans), but the text you get in a PDF or a blog has as much emotion and humanity as an Oxford dictionary. It all leads back to the "chatter" format mentioned a few paragraphs up - personally speaking, I thought that the resultant discussion from our endeavours was excellent, but it was an absolute nightmare not just in terms of editing, but also in terms of organising the people to meet up on MSN at the same time. Another obvious point to make is that these formats are involving; I can recall a time when I was tasked with writing about the launch of the Halo 3 Beta (issue #8), and initially I was desperate to include boxout-based opinion from other writers - when drafting out the flatplan I thought "everyone's going to want a piece of the Halo 3 article; why not let them all have a few words?" However, a decision was eventually made for me to write the whole shebang (making me the target for any flames I'd receive from anal-retentive Halo fans who'd be desperate to pick out something I overlooked. Thanks chaps. :P)

I don't have any regrets about the final article - the singular opinion gave it some focus and made editing a bit easier - but listening to the latest DorkCast as I write this, I find the show funny, spontaneous, snappy, varied (with many opinions flying about), but above all this it has a more approachable, social side that's missing from a lot of websites that have several contributors pulling in different directions. After all, when a "group" project has members independently parading their own views, the only thing the consumer will get out of it is mixed messages.

To keep up-to-date with Gamerdork's news and shows, bookmark Rllmukfm.net or subscribe to the feed, or something. Happy listening.