The Xeno Games

Tetsuya Takahashi's Xenogears (1998) and the Xenosaga and Xenoblade series after it. The power source at the centre of the cosmology is called the Zohar; the god-machine is Deus; the vocabulary reaches into Gnosticism, Jung and Nietzsche as freely as into the Kabbalah.

The purest specimen of a whole genre of borrowing: a real title used as a proper noun for an object. The Zohar is a thirteenth-century Aramaic commentary on the Torah; here it is a glowing artefact in a hangar. Millions of players now hold the word "Zohar" with a strong, vivid, entirely fictional referent attached — which is a more complete kind of displacement than any mistranslation could manage.