tatemae

With that said I suggest we do make MCA the most prestigious event of the year. We can elect a committee of 10-15 mappers and 5 mappers as heads (of varied origin and mapping tastes, the criteria for heads should be stricter) with the following requirements:

1. Minimum 5 years in the community of the game

2. At least 3 years since the first rank

3. Should have not less than 10 ranked maps

The requirements could increase the following years and the committee roster should at least slightly change.

The committee should mostly consist of mappers who won several mapping contests and are acclaimed in the mapping community. Ideally - previous MCA awards winners. The discussion on the best map of the year should proceed to a voting. We should also establish specific beatmap selection criteria although they shound't be static either, some main criteria should be: concept novelty, technical execution difficulty, creativity etc.; if we simply consider playability and "fun", the contest won't be different from any other.

I do not have a specific solution for the internal structure of the committee yet. It shouldn't be possible to win MCA awards more than once and participants can not vote for themselves (or ideally the committee members can not participate as mappers). I think that will increase the prestige and objectivity of the event.

I would like to note that I am talking about mapping as an aesthetic phenomenon. i.e. an intellectual activity of creating a visual representation of music which we can perceive aesthetically.
Music is one of the most ancient forms of art. However music does not have a shape - we can not perceive it other than by hearing. With that ephemerality it is difficult to imagine some kind of visual image of a given sound if possible at all. Music can evoke various emotions, and the same sound can evoke different emotions within 2 different persons. The emotions are related to the person's experiences and memories linked to the music consciously or subconsciously. Throughout the human history people were trying to describe music in a variety of ways, mostly anthropological; most popular being paint and words, which express the feelings from the music. The osu!editor however pretends to visualize music.
Mapping is an artifical language (character system) and each map is a text. In linguistic terminology the signified is a musical unit, while signs are circle, slider and spinners. The mapper records the signified through hearing and depending on the perception uses a specific visual symbol; these symbols in most cases are organized on the timeline in the same way as the music itself. Sometimes for practical purposes the sequence is modified, for example to accomodate lower difficulties or overmapping etc. Nevertheless, mapping relates to music as its potential visual form. This however doesn't mean that mapping can "encode" or how mappers say it "follow" the song, since editor functions are heavily restricted. The main purpose of mapping is to create a simulation of a musical composition via pressing buttons, and this idea limits the notion of following the music; movement-mapping does not create the necessary visual effect, is restricted and doesn't provide the variety for visualizing music.