[SotW] Song of the Week - Definition of "Professional VGM Composer"

PLEASE ONLY VOTE IF YOU PARTICIPATE IN SONG OF THE WEEK

This is a poll on official policy, so I'd appreciate it if only people who vote and/or nominate vote on this matter. If I don't recognize your name, I won't count your vote with the final tally. Thanks in advance.

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orion_mk3 brought up some concerns about the professional VGM composer status of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was a few VGM credits, but many, many more original works. According to current SotW rules, a "professional VGM composer" is anyone "who has composed at least one musical score specifically for, and featured in, a published video/computer game." So, the question is,

Is the current definition of "professional VGM composer" acceptable, and if not, what should it change to?

Options:

• Yes
  Everything is peachy keen, so don't change a thing.
• No; use some other fixed number
  The definition should change to some other number explicitly specified. This could be two, three, or a formula like "a person isn't a VGM composer if he has twice as many non-VGM works as VGM works, but if he has more than five VGM works, then he's definitely eligible." If you choose this, please post your preference.
• No; use discretion
  Choose this if you think that both the number of VGM credits and original works should be weighed in deciding whether or not someone is a "professional VGM composer," but think we should just decide on a case-by-case basis when necessary instead of having things set in stone.
• Other
  Come up with something I didn't? Please share!
• Abstain/Don't care
  ¯\(º_o)/¯

Important to note are the ramifications of this: this only affects the definition of "professional VGM composer,", and so only the following parts of the rules:

Originally Posted by Nomination rule 3

Only songs from the following are allowed:

• . . .
• Unpublished VGM arrangements by professional VGM composers
• Original/concept pieces composed by professional VGM composers

That's all. Any tracks written for a game are always okay. This definition change would only affect which unpublished arrangements and original pieces are eligible.

Feel free to justify your decisions (especially with an Other vote) and talk amongst yourselves in this thread. I'm going to give this a week for now, but I might end up having a mod extend it by another week if the BSC distracts too many people.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I've been thinking about this one a while, far more than the other issue, which I'm on the fence on. Initially, I was very much in the "one game and you're good camp." After all, once you've composed one video game, you're a video game composer, right?

However, there's another word in the rules, "professional," and this made me pause and figure out why exactly we have this rule in the first place. I thought about two (somewhat) recent original tracks we've had in SotW, Cool Voice from Carnaval by Takayuki Aihara and Blind Kiss from Be Filled With Feeling by Shinji Hosoe. By any reasonable definition, both of these men are professional VGM composers. And before the weeks in which these tracks appeared, I had never heard of either album.

I think these are exactly the kinds of tracks that the original pieces rule was meant to allow. Original works by composers are generally shadowed by their game compositions, so this rule allows them to get exposure too. The purpose isn't to simply expand the eligible SotW field to any track that can be tenuously linked to VGM, but to show off tracks that people may have passed by in the search for the repertoires of established VGM composers.

I vote for discretion. Let's figure out together whether or not people are entrenched in VGM enough to have their original works exposed as being the overlooked and out-of-the-norm.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

A vast majority are in favor of the discretionary method, so I will change the rules footnote

Quote:

A "professional VGM composer" is defined as a person who has composed at least one musical score specifically for, and featured in, a published video/computer game. This definition can still be put up for debate on a per-artist basis, such as if the quantity of scores composed seems lacking.

to

Quote:

Whether or not someone is a "professional VGM composer" will be decided on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of SotW participants, taking into account both the VGM and original works of the composer.

unless someone has serious objections.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.