Mega Man (Kim)

Introduction
Through the introduction of literature in the wired world, video games, art and literature are all crossing boundaries and are getting more difficult to clearly draw lines to differentiate one another. It has opened many doors for authors to create and share their text and readers to access and connect with the authors, making the computer a universal device to replace text as the form of mediation. The Reading at Risk Report admitted that despite the risk of cultural impoverishment, electronic media is offering considerable advantages of diversity and access aiding knowledge sharing possible without significant effort. In contrast to the fear of shortened attention spans and lack of passive participation, the recent emergence of user created content has proven to create online communities that make complex communications and insights in the wired world. The overall internet usage has seen tremendous growth from the years 2000 and 2010. The number of Internet users globally rose from 400 million to 2 billion by 2010, and a minimum of 20% of the world’s population had access to computers with at least 1 billion Google searches every day. With the constant torrent of users hopping on the internet, the Internet has enabled totally new forms of social interaction and activities. It has opened doors for social networking such as Facebook or Twitter, creating new ways to socialize and interact, or for leisure activities such as multiplayer gaming. While there are thousands of other usages for the internet, all of these forms of recreation create communities that users can create online.

The Word Processor of the Gods had shown its concern for the endless possibilities new technology may bring and how it may change our perception of reality. Though not entirely like horror fiction, the remediation has smoothly occurred with the wide spread use of computers, making the computers a successful form of immediacy providing visual representations of text, videos and pictures while the users forget the actual presence of the medium. Online encyclopedias created by users is a victim of this process, and as mentioned in Does Google Make Us Stupid, many users of electronic media search for quick gratification and now take most the information we search on the internet to exist for granted forgetting the presence of the medium. However, the true power of the wired world lies with the ability to attract users into its world and make users participants whether it be Wikipedia contributions, computer gaming forums or even simple online chatting. Just as Ong argued that the sound world moves to a world of visual space, new media takes form in digital literacy, video games compared to traditional writing and print. As the new orality of telephones or television based its delivery on the more primary uses of writing and print, our new generation of orality uses its previous technology to a higher degree synthesizing the functions of what telephone, radio and television had provided. Just as Ong argued writing and print were essential to the operation of television equipment, it is essential that we understand the use of radio or telephones to fully utilize computers in our generation, which is the attempt to remediate writing.



Video games have been a long time follower of the remediation process of writing, for it has been providing texts, visual images, user interaction and various other forms of medium in one package. Nicholas Carr may argue that the result may scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration, but video games have been successful in creating a solid user base and now the internet is filled with gaming guides, gaming fan pages, gaming social forums created by gamers, for gamers. My analysis will focus on the hypermediacy which has occurred among gamers who yearn for nostalgia for the original Mega Man game series. Proven by the recent release of Mega Man 9 and 10, nostalgic gamers appreciated the original form of 2D side scrolling original Mega Man series and developers had created Mega Man games for modern gaming platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii. Mega Man's nostalgic 8-bit game style created a user community which appreciates the classic gameplay and exist in the forms of knowledge communities which share information of the storyline, gameplay and tips for the game. Many videos containing clips of gameplay footage can be easily found on the internet which proves it has taken a step of remediation from a game to a video creating a reader community developing video clips of gameplay footage or even films based on the game.

Interpretative Disputes
Though not a heated dispute, the Mega Man storyline has a discussion of interpretations of the plot. Side scrolling games such as Mega Man has limited room for open-end interpretation, however, gamers have formed a community to discuss what is canon. The Mega Man Network discusses the definition of canon which they reference the use in the Bible to choose which chapters would be kept as the original version. Just as different denominations of Christianity follow different standards for judgment, the Mega Man community gathers to choose which enemies or non-playable characters get to be canon. Without any doubt direct knowledge that is sourced through Capcom, the developer of the Mega Man series, is considered canon or official. The main domain in which the readers focus on is filling in the gaps between plots that have never been officially released. In the process, fan fiction plays a big role, but communities such as the Mega Man Network decides whether such sourcebook information has in-depth analysis based on the information that Capcom has released. The community has developed up to a level where it now follows their own policies of canonical stature. For instance, they argue against various manga published for their conflict in minor story details which cannot be judged official since some do not come directly from a Capcom source.

These interpretations can relate to the value we put in what is authentic or real as we had seen through Dick’s Do Androids Sleep of Electric Sheep. Through numerous publishes of mangas, card game series and spin offs, the readers who are truly committed to the canon definition of the game are trying their best to collect the developer sourced information and find common ground on what the basis for the original story is, putting much emphasis on the value of what is official. It is not the scarcity of authenticity that enables the readers to create such communities, but the heart or passion to fill in the gaps and be even more closely engaged and immersed in the game as true fans would do. Despite the modern development of 3D gaming technology which is dominant in the gaming market, filling in plots with gamers' own ideas based on official evidence for an old 2D side scrolling game resembles Rick's struggle to value to original or artificial. Ong’s argument which asserts that published or finalized writing gives a sense of closure is an important aspect to track whether information is canon or not, for Capcom’s decision to publish is what finalizes the readers’ efforts to define canonical information. What is published or written by the developer leaves no room for interpretation. The missing gaps which the developers failed to finalize is what drives the users on Mega Man Network to claim canon.

Knowledge Communities
The Mega Man Knowledge Base, also known as MMKB is the wiki-based encyclopedia collecting detailed information of the whole Mega Man video game franchise developed by Capcom. The video game itself, characters, secrets and walk-throughs or even merchandise is covered in the site, and it all collected by people love and care about the game rather than the developers themselves. The original knowledge of Mega Man communities developed in homes, where friends and families would gather to share tricks and tips to overcome the notoriously difficult obstacles and bosses of the game. For instances, most bosses of the official Mega Man game series follow a countering element structure where as a boss with fire related abilities would be weak to water based abilities and stronger at earth related abilities, very much similar to Rock-Paper-Scissors. Due to the nature of this mechanism, it became a revolutionary strategy in gaming to decide which boss to defeat and first, and which order of bosses to defeat thereafter. Such information could not be collected easily through the Internet when it was released in 1987.



The best way to collect such knowledge was to develop your own strategies, ask friends and share the tips and information. Later, official strategy guides released through Nintendo Power magazines would later provide an in-depth analysis of each installment and would have walk-throughs and stage maps to aid gamers who had a hard time overcoming the game’s difficulty.

For instance, later Mega Man installments such as the Mega Man X series would have power-up items and upgradable-parts hidden within the stage and the official strategy guides would reveal which parts of the map the user must visit to receive such upgrades. Since my analysis only focuses on the original installment of the Mega Man series (1987~), I will not go into detail of the rest of the newer series which started off the walk-through Internet communities already well developed, however must at least describe how these communities have formed and what kind of functions they serve.

A dominant strategy to clear each Mega Man installment would eventually provail and be shared through strategy guides and written text, until the introduction of the internet and video sharing. Now such information is easy to access over internet sites such as GameFaqs.com, most users would skip the process of figuring out which boss to defeat first and neglect the quest to search for hidden upgrade parts. A map or boss strategy can also be accessed through video sharing sites such as YouTube for easy ways to finish the game. Those who believe that the gamer and game interaction is what gaming is all about, show great distaste for gamers who follow strategy guides religiously rather than quick referencing to beat a difficult boss, much like considered as forbidden knowledge. Gaining such forbidden knowledge came with consequences of dimished engagement and immersion into the game, however an emergence of a group of people to try to clear the game as quick and masterfully as possible open new chapters on how to enjoy the game. Known as Speed Runs, gamers would try to beat other gamers' records on how quick they can finish the game, and such knowledge communities are now embedded with the recent installments of Mega Man such as 9 and 10 as they can share and view own gameplay records through the game's ranking boards.

Remediation
The original form the video game has taken a new form of Movies. To go back to the original forms of remediation that occurred a few decades ago, can relate to the introduction of the hand-held gaming platform Gameboy from Nintendo. Through the introduction of Gameboy, Mega Man was already becoming a mobile game that you could carry around rather than playing in front of your TV, when you would never know your parents would want to watch TV or stop making you play the game. The fact that using 4 AA batteries would power up a system that you could play in your very own room or even outside with your friends was revolutionary, and it failed the completely replace the old form of classic platform to TV set-up, as the games’ graphics and sound effects were not as powerful.

Now readers are engaging the Mega Man series as a potential blockbuster movie script and a small postproduction and movie studio located in New York has already released a fan-created film on Mega Man. The gaming plot has been reused as a movie plot but unlike a lot of movies based on books, movies based on video games take another extra step of being converted into text. Gamers of the Mega Man series have given the series new energy by making the effort to convert a video game plot into a novel or movie script based on canon information, and then converted into a film. Just like movies, video games now have their own soundtracks which are mostly included in Collector’s Edition packages nowadays. However, Mega Man has an archive of Original Soundtracks available online, and is very easy to find Mega Man background music tributes created by those who enjoyed the heavily synthesized 8-bit sound of the original game series.

Recently, a video simply containing clips of popular video game main characters going right has receieved over 1 million views. Titled 'Go Right', side scrolling video game characters would go right which is the standard direction of travel for the game characters who eventually run into obstacles and try to run left, but ultimately overcomes them and decides to go right again. The video gives a moral messages to an audience not limited to gamers, crossing borders of reality. A video created with video game clips provides an encouraging message to those who are stressed in real life to continue to move on after overcoming hardships. Video games no longer exist as simple means of entertainment, but reinforcing experiences to people who need encouragement. A remediation process takes place when users create videos recorded from computer games and it has become a popular genre of videos to share online and has developed a new genre of Machinima, which is a term originally used to refer cinematic productions of 3D rendered computer graphics. Now the term is dominantly used to explain videos of gaming clips created by gamers who share them online such as speed runs.

Additional Links
Mega Man 10 Speed Run

Mega Man Fan Fiction

Scorpion vs. Ryu - Good example of early forms of Machinima