Scope Updates: New Category for Game-adjacent Music.

[Secret Squirrel]

Recently, we have been fine-tuning our scope, which defines the albums that are eligible for submission. Most of the changes are minor, but the most significant change is the addition of a new album category called "Game-adjacent". This category replaces the old "Demo Scene" category, which has always seemed out-of-place when compared to the other album categories. The broader definition of "Game-adjacent" allows us to take some other albums that were classified under other categories and move them into this more suitable category.

Game-adjacent music encompasses the following:

• Music related to gaming or game systems but not attached to any specific game.
• Notional game soundtracks: Music created for fictional games.
• Original music created for rhythm game simulators: Albums containing short, extended, arranged and remixed versions of songs used for rhythm game chart simulators such as Be-Music Source (BMS) files, osu! maps, and other chart simulators that are not directly tied to a specific game/releases.
• Chiptunes: Music created using the sound chips of older gaming and computing hardware, including modern iterations that utilize digital audio workstations (DAWs) and software synthesizers to emulate the sound of retro hardware
• Demoscene: music created for "demos", which were computer programs that demonstrated graphics and audio capabilities of computer systems.
• Other miscellaneous music/sound from gaming systems. (e.g., Wii menu music.)
• Example1, Example2, Example3, Example4

We have also adjusted a quirk of the color-selection rules. Formerly, an album in the Demo Scene category that was also marked as Doujin would display its title in purple instead of orange. With the move to the Game-adjacent category, we have fixed this behavior, so game-adjacent doujins will be orange, and standard commercial ones will be purple.

The updated scope can be found here.

[Robin]

Glad to finally see this addition at last, especially when we've kinda been awkwardly adding those by improvising over the course of the past 15 years. We still need to figure out if we should put BMS/Rhythm Game competitions names in the product field, and I believe we should as there are a lot of things to centralize and I think product pages would be perfect for this considering there are generally quite a significant amount of related album releases tied to these.

[Nicolaas Hamman]

I missed the creative process for this, but it seems very cool to have all these oddballs unified.