It was the unanimous decision of the staff team to disband the idea of official staff writers in favour of a wider contributor system. This allows those who wish to create reviews for the site on a non-regular basis to get something back, provides contributors with more freedom and less stress, and ensures people are judged by contributions, not title. It's evolution to reflect the size and focus of the new site.
After a contributor has made four original, detailed, and high-quality reviews for the site, they will be eligible for recognition, rewards, and a chance to discuss site issues. They will be given an invitation into the private Contributor's Central, free to receive their own email address, given their own contributor's page on the site (like the staff page now), and provided with a forum title ('Reviewer'). It's very easy to receive such recognition while helping the site and doing an interesting task, so why not consider it?
A good review is often one that provides a critical or descriptive analysis of an album while being informative, interesting, and relevant to a wide audience. We don't offer any specific guidelines for reviews now other than they must exceed 250 words, though this shouldn't be used as an excuse for shoddy and thoughtless writing. Be true to your own written style and thoughts, consider other people's perspective, and structure the review in a logical and accessible way.
We are diversifying the range of reviews on the site to make everything more casual, accessible, productive, and fun. We're moving to a system more like SoundtrackCentral where briefer reviews accessible to laymen are aplenty, which should appeal to many contributors. The number of deeper analytical reviews being produced should not significantly change, though, thanks to most old contributors from SS still writing.
We'd love to see more reviews of a tonne of albums, but we're especially interested in those related to mainstream Square series (Final Fantasy, Chrono, Xeno, and Kingdom Hearts), Dragon Quest, Mario, Zelda, Ys, SaGa, Seiken Densetsu, Grandia, Lunar, True Love Story, Tales, Star Ocean, and Valkyrie Profile. I'll post a reviews request list soon for those who are interested.
We're also implementing a system that allows recognised contributors to submit reviews of any game music album regardless of whether it is specifically related to our coverage. We always intended to be a general game music site with an SE focus and this seems like the best way to give attention to wider VGM while giving contributors more freedom and a chance to reflect their originality. We do, however, prefer people to focus on our coverage principally.
We will continue to have a senior staff team comprising of me, Sayo, Soapy, Totz, Aevloss, Locke, and TheShroud13 that will provide direction for contributors, advice to me on most significant matters, and an image for the site overall. For now, this staff team will be static, i.e. not adding anyone new in the forseeable future, and only those who are invited are eligible to join. For any questions, PM me. To submit a review, submitting a word document to chris@squareenixmusic.com is preferable, though PM suffices too.
Bottom line: Everyone should seriously consider submitting something in the near-future as you're all capable of doing so. Go on, try it! You won't regret it.
