Sound Criticism Problem

Question

There is one problem.

Sometimes when I see a new movie or computer game I often have a desire to discuss numerous things about the sound of these movies or games.

There are myriad of sites where you can discuss practically all the aspects of media production. For example game forums. You can discuss with other people anything what you want. Graphic, scenario, art, game design, animation etc. And often a considerable part of this critique has a healthy and quite useful opinions. But if you begin to discuss the sound, people will just say good/bad sound, nice/poor music and that's it.

I understand that there are many professionals on this site (or on friendly sites) and it is often a little inconvenient to discuss the work of your friends or colleagues. But IMO it has a very bad side. Again, if somebody will release significant game or movie and for some reason there would be some poor aspects, people just won't leave it without an attention.

I came from gamedev and the reading of the opinions of your work is a very common and useful practice. So any opinions about that? :) Maybe some resources, sites, forums where you could discuss it with other concerned people?

Thank you and sorry for my English.

Answer 1

There's Pretty Ugly Game Sound Study It's not really a discussion forum, but it does invite people to post up specific examples of good/bad sound in games.

Answer 2

This is the kind of thing that I wanted to do in the Film Sound Discussion Group I started over at Designing Sound. Thus far, we've only done two simple discussions concerning primarily workflow ideas...had to keep it simple to develop a system and figure out what the limitations of the web client were.

There were a lot of bugs with the web client (AnyMeeting) the first time we tried it. They've since eliminated most of those bugs, and we had a successful session with Ann Kroeber just last week.

Keep an eye out over there, because we're going to get that going on a more regular basis. We'll be expanding the subjects that we talk about when we do.

Update: Just announced the next Film Sound Discussion Group over on Designing Sound. The topic is Cast Away (2000), and it will be a free form community discussion (with some moderation on my part). This one is supposed to be like a book club, so come with your opinions.