This is what it looks like when you keep the connections. More than a hundred on one map: poems, games, stories, a deck of cards. Every line is marked proven or only a resemblance, and the ones that died when I checked are on the page too. Some of it holds. Some may not.
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You may have watched a Chinese short drama where a captured general recites a Tang poem and golden light pours out of him, or a Li Bai poem is judged a verse of the ninth level. The poems are real. The grading is the drama's own idea. This page asks why that looks so familiar, and follows the question as far as it goes.
It is a connection map, the long companion to the essay The Cost of Discovery. It has three pillars: stories, computer games, and physical games. Then it shows where they cross. Some lines are clear. The Tang exams ranked people by their verse. Jin Yong's martial arts novels, from 1957 on, already had skill trees, loot and leaderboards. Dungeons & Dragons gave characters levels and gave the bard a class. In 1995 Chinese students abroad built a text game on that structure and filled it with Jin Yong's world. Later, games were turned back into stories, and one was shot upright for a phone.
Every entry carries a tag. D means documented. P means parallel: the same shape in two places with no proven line between them. Some dots that looked like links failed the checking, and the page lists those too.
Near the end, the page sorts "level" into seven kinds, from growth you keep to power taken from others. A source list closes it.
Stories were turned into games. The games were turned back into stories. Then somebody shot one upright for a phone.
"Level" is one word. It covers at least seven different things.
One strange hunch, checked cheaply, and the whole map it opened.
When you are young you see connections everywhere. Then checking one takes a week, so you drop it. I had six, starting with a poem that glows with a power level in a Chinese drama, and had never put them on one table. Checking costs almost nothing now, so I did. The machine checked every one. Which ones matter is still a person's job.