I had a total blast with this jam, both during composition as well as voting time! After voting on quite a few entries, I've collected some thoughts I thought I'd share with you guys and see if you have similar thoughts or not.
- Critiquing music is hard. When I critique a game, it's so much easier to pinpoint specific things I think can be improved, because games force me to actively interact with them. Music is a much more passive interaction and even when I'm trying to actively listen to it, I find it pretty easy to say whether I like a piece of music, but much harder to say why and think of what exactly makes it work or doesn't make it work.
- Critiquing video game music is even harder, at least when detached from the game. There are definitely games that require a very restrained soundtrack, but without those games, those soundtracks are in danger of sounding a little dull. I feel like there might have been some entries in this jam that would fit a certain type of game very well, but which I didn't rate very highly because a "pure" listen just wasn't very interesting to me.
I think a fun idea for a different jam might be to actually have a game without a soundtrack and compose music fitting for it. Of course, this has some problems, both organizational (someone has to write a game, people have to play the game before they can start composing and so on) and creative (there may be a lack in variety), but I still think it could be a fun idea. Would you guys be interested in something like that?
- Rating composition is really, really hard. I found this category the one I usually had most trouble with. I think this had a multitude of reasons:
- I was never sure I really caught the compositional nuances of a piece. For example, I quite like compositions where a motif is picked up in a subtle way, but considering I listend to most entries only once or twice, stuff like this seems really easy to miss.
- There are a lot of genres I just don't have a lot of experience with. Most notably, I find it extremely hard to rate the composition of ambient pieces of music, and Wikipedia's claim that ambient music "may lack net composition" doesn't really help with that. I wonder if maybe in general there would be a better word for this category?
- I would like to at least pretend to rate composition somewhat objectively, but it's just really hard for me to seperate the objective qualities of a piece of music from my subjective liking for it.
- Correlation to theme sometimes was a bit interesting too. There were a few cases where the composer had a really convincing idea written as text, but I just had a hard time to hear how they implemented that idea in their music. To a certain extent, the same applies to the Creativity category.
Anyway, none of this is in any way meant to overshadow how cool this jam and the entries are! I'm super impressed by the amount of high-quality entries made in just 48 hours and every single participant who submitted did a great job :) Also thanks to Lone Rabbit for hosting the jam!
I think that's about it for now. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading my incoherent ramblings. What do you guys think?