Here is a follow-up question I have been asking myself: do the similarities stem just from the way humans learn things OR do they stem from the nature of the things themselves. In other words, is this a common strategy we use to learn anything or is this pattern inherent to the things we learn. After all games, dance, music and language are all things that were created by humans and their design may have been informed by common features of the human thinking process. What if combos and bosses are variations on universal anthropological constants?

Really, though, a lot of this falls into the general category of meta-cognition. I could write much the same essay about learning bass guitar: the process of breaking down complex steps into simple stages, drilling for muscle memory, and mastering transitions around the fretboard and strings, for example. In many ways, the process of learning a game is the same as the process of learning anything. It’s *what* we’re learning when gaming that sometimes troubles me.