It’s been my experience that most of the games industry pretty much shuts down between Christmas and New Year’s. Now, I’m fairly certain there’ll be a Rock Band DLC announcement this week, and we might get a Guitar Hero DLC announcement, but aside from that it’s bound to be awfully slow.

So I was thinking, what can we do that’s music-game related this week that isn’t just a week’s worth of open threads? In fact, I was thinking exactly that as I was stashing my World Tour drums in the closet last week, when I happened to notice the enormous pile of game-related promotional items that had accumulated over the past couple years.

A plan came together.

So here’s what we’re going to do this week: We’re going to play a game of Six Degrees of Separation. Each day this week, I’ll publish a challenge featuring two celebrities; your job will be to figure out how they’re connected.

There is, of course, a catch: The connections must be via songs in The Vault. You’ll get a freebie on either end, but otherwise you’ll have to connect the people using only songs featured in music games. Now, I’m not going to pick people at random; I’ll have a specific song or songs in mind, and I’ll tell you how many songs you need to connect them. And these connections will be via publicly available information — you will be able to find everything you need on Wikipedia.

What do you get for your efforts? A themed collection of videogame swag. You can see the whole lineup above, but I’ll be breaking that down into five smaller bits to give away each weekday through January 1. There is some very unique (and quite possibly rather valuable) stuff in here — you will no doubt find something worth your while.

Now, some rules, details and examples:

1. I’ll be posting a challenge once each day, from today (Monday, December 28) through Friday (January 1.) The post will go up at a different time each day, but it will be no earlier than 8:00 am Eastern time, and no later than 8:00 pm Eastern time.
2. The first person to leave a comment on that post with the correct song(s) — from The Vault, remember — will be the winner.
3. The correct answer will be chosen at my sole discretion — and yes, I will have a specific song or songs in mind. However: It is entirely possible that I may have missed a better connection between two celebrities, so show your work. I’m looking for the most accurate answer, which might not be the answer I initially had in mind. So even if you think another commenter has picked an answer that works, if you can come up with an answer that works better, you’re still in the running.
4. The correct answers will be revealed no sooner than Monday, January 4, and guesses will continue to be accepted until the correct answers are revealed.
5. To make everything fair for everyone, you can win only once — except for today’s (Monday’s) challenge. Since I’m giving away the smallest batch of items today, you can win today’s contest and still be eligible to win one more.
6. If it turns out that a challenge is proving harder than I expected, I may leave a clue on the Plastic Axe Twitter feed. So you may want to keep an eye on that.
7. Winners will need to send me an e-mail from the e-mail address you used to leave your comment in order to claim your prize. So you’ll want to use a real e-mail address when you leave your comment or else I won’t be able to verify your identity.

Now, as to how people can be connected:

1. For song connections, the people on each end will have played together on the same recording of at least one song in The Vault. So, for example, Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain have a valid connection for our purposes (via any Nirvana song from Nevermind on), but Dave Grohl and Chad Channing (Nirvana’s original drummer) do not.
2. For the “freebie” connections, the people on each end will be related either via direct family (parent/child or sibling) or well-known romance (marriage or otherwise). So, for example, Courtney Love has a valid connection to Kurt Cobain, but his high-school prom date does not.
3. It bears repeating that in some cases there can be more than one valid song connection. So, if I asked for a song linking Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, pretty much any Beatles song on which John Lennon and George Harrison both played would be a correct answer.

Finally, I’ll do an example so you can see how to show your work. Here’s the challenge:

Link Lisa Bonet to Stephanie Seymour in two songs.

And here’s the answer:

Lisa Bonet was married to Lenny Kravitz; Lenny Kravitz played on “Always on the Run” with Slash; Slash played on “Sweet Child O’ Mine” with Axl Rose; and Axl Rose had a several-year relationship with Stephanie Seymour.

See? Easy! Got any questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments here. And I hope you have as much fun figuring these things out as I’ve had putting them together.