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My friend Tim Nixon of Meaningful Play recently commented on an essay by James Portnow (and associated video by Portnow and Daniel Floyd) circulating on the subject of “tangential learning”, whose basic thrust is that by dropping historically loaded terms into a game’s story, you might convince some small portion of your player-base to go and learn about what that term means. Beyond being merely lazy, I think that this behaviour is irresponsible and manipulative.

Portnow uses the example of the main adversary in Final Fantasy VII, whose name is “Sephiroth”.  In the game, Sephiroth is a pretty stock-standard villain; there is justification for his ill-doing, description of a muddied relationship with the protagonists and so forth. According to Wikipedia, the problem is that “Sephiroth”, or “Sephirot” is a Hebrew term which means “The ten attributes that make up God.”  I wouldn’t be surprised if even that is a gross simplification of what it’s supposed to mean, but it’s already a stretch to go from “properties of god” to “main bad guy.”

My problem with the disparity is that fans of the game will develop an image of Sephiroth the character, and believe that there is some relation to Sephirot the concept.  Misuse of important cultural and historical icons has been popular through the ages, but Final Fantasy is especially guilty -  making no distinction between mythical figures in Aztec, English, Norse and Japanese lore.

That’s not to say terms like Sephirot should be off-limits, though.  If the ten properties of God (consciousness, love, vision etc.) can be integrated into the design of the development of the character, or the story, it might be a reasonable place to use such a heavily-loaded term, but when words have historical significance -  and particularly religious significance, then we need to be careful to not to be too clumsy with them.  There’s an important difference between provocative and stupid.

I think that this practice is benefitting from these terms because people are likely to know that they are significant, but be unsure of what that significance is.  If a term is used in a videogame, players are likely to feel pleased that the term is being presented in a context that is approachable, and are likely to assume that the game’s use of term has at least some relation to the real-world meaning.  It can be difficult to un-learn these spurious associations, and if a developer can’t integrate a concept as interesting as Sephirot into their game, they don’t deserve to use that label.