randomkid said:
Actually, I think a bigger N would have reduced the diversity and increased homogenization. With less people voting, the list was more idiosyncratic and weird, and thus, more interesting. Unless the increased sample was recruited exclusively from a C64 forum or something you weren't gonna see those tracks show up anywhere, as cool as some of that music is.
Perhaps if the rule "only three tracks per game" was reduced to "one track per game", it might've decreased the Nintendo/SE bias a little (but I somehow doubt that would be the case given the depth of each company's music library, there would probably be even more tracks to cover; or some tracks would not have gotten as many votes as they did). And probably introducing rules to "be sure to include X western themes if possible" would certainly generate another kind of bias and limit tracks from certain series (increasing mode of certain western games).
I guess no matter what happens (implementing new rules, increasing n for the sample size, decreasing mode of certain games included, increasing mode of certain games included, etc), these sorts of criticisms are going to exist no matter what kind of list is generated.
Anyways high barrier of entry (100-track suggestion, some kind of forum membership) plus HG101's own site demographics is what's most responsible for the composition of that list. Seems like most of the people that participated were music afficionados, which is fine by me, although it would have been nicer if more western-focused afficianados had voted.
Even though the list seems to have been generated from HG101's votes and some of the GAF votes, it would have been nicer to get a bit of a distribution of votes from other areas. I'm not complaining about the list because I think it's fine (plus much of the stuff I voted for got on there).
Perhaps just asking users for a Top 10 and generating a Top 100 or Top 50 from that may have been easier, but I still think the bias would have existed based on the demographics of the fora from which the votes were collected.
I kind of want to export the list to Excel just to see the distribution of tracks included from certain games. Based on the fora that this list ended up being generated from, the pro-SE/Nintendo music bias is going to exist, but I'm curious to see
how many tracks there are per game, per company, etc.
