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.

I think what Koster is talking about is this:  After concentrating on the electric guitar for four years, a person may have developed the equivalent of two years of xylophone training, one year of drums and so on.

This model is suggested in most physical fitness plans (so I am told,) although after a certain amount of specialization, it’s often suggested that a person’s more general fitness actually decreases, given the finite resources that the human body has.

We need to be cautious about suggesting that training for one thing will result in losing skill in another, since it gives us an excuse not to perfect one particular skill set. The way in which a human being can incorporate a variety of different skills is what makes us great, and in particular, the incorporation of a diverse (and seemingly conflicting) set of mental skills is probably the coolest part.

I also think that the breadth of knowledge that people get from learning a single thing is very different. Someone learning the guitar for 10 years may only have the equivalent of 5 years’ skill by the end of it, but may end up equally skilled on trumpet, vibraphone, violin and the drums.  Conversely, someone may end up with 15 years’ worth of skill on the guitar, but be completely useless on everything else.

With musical instruments, it’s easy to see that an accoustic guitar would be closely related to an electric, where a banjo or a ukelele would be slightly less related.  If we look at sports and take baseball as the central sport, then it would make sense that softball and cricket would be closely related, and that soccer and football may come into the mix too, but to a lesser extent. Somewhere in the distance, someone’s snooker skill may improve too.

What about quadratic equations? Very few people will ever use quadratic equations for any reason other than to pass the test on quadratic equations, but we learn them anyway.  If we think about this breadth of knowledge, though, we can see that we aren’t just learning about quadratics as we stare at the graph paper and crunch the numbers.  We might learn a little about algebra, graphing, calculus, and possibly things outside the realm of mathematics altogether.

Basically, everything that we do has unintended consequences.  Destroying an enemy base tends to damage civilian infrastructure, and we call that Collateral Damage.  It’s terrible, but it’s taken largely for granted.  What isn’t taken for granted, though, is that learning about one thing tends to make us think about other things.  I like to call it Incidental Learning, and I like to talk about it a lot.