Apparently Skyrim has found itself in the news again.

Not because Bethesda has released another version of it.

This time, it has been pulled into the reporting around the death of a man who climbed into a tiger enclosure.

One news report raised the possibility that he may have been acting out some kind of gaming fantasy, pointing towards Skyrim and his interest in the game.

And that immediately bothered me.

Not because Skyrim needs defending, and not because video games can never influence people.

But because there is a fairly large gap between discovering that somebody played a particular game and having evidence that the game had anything to do with what they later did.

Those are not the same thing.

Something tragic happened. There may eventually be more information about why it happened.

But until there is evidence connecting someone’s gaming habits to their actions, I am not sure what pointing towards Skyrim actually adds.

Other than giving us something familiar to blame.

Same Panic, Different Target

And we have been doing this for a very long time.

Before video games, there were horror films. Comic books were apparently corrupting young people. Heavy metal became dangerous. Dungeons & Dragons became suspicious.

Every generation seems to find some form of entertainment that supposedly explains why people behave in ways society finds frightening or difficult to understand.

The target changes.

The argument does not seem to change very much.

Something terrible happens. We discover the person involved watched something, listened to something, read something or played something, and that piece of entertainment gets pulled into the explanation.

Sometimes before we have established whether it actually explains anything at all.

Horror films did it.

Heavy metal did it.

Dungeons & Dragons did it.

Video games did it.

Apparently there is always something on the shelf, in the stereo or on the screen ready to explain behaviour that is considerably more complicated than that.

And now Skyrim, a single-player fantasy RPG released in 2011, can find itself dragged into a story about somebody climbing into a tiger enclosure fifteen years later.

That does not prove the game had nothing to do with what happened.

But it certainly does not prove that it did.

That distinction matters.

We Have Seen This Before

There are plenty of examples of this pattern.

In Britain during the early 1980s, it was the so-called “video nasties.”

The arrival of home video meant people suddenly had access to horror films that had not previously gone through the same classification process as cinema releases. What followed was a moral panic about what these films might be doing to the people watching them, particularly children.

The press and Parliament became heavily involved. Films were seized, prosecuted and eventually caught up in tighter regulation of home video.

The fear was familiar.

People were watching disturbing things, therefore those disturbing things might be corrupting them.

Then there was heavy metal.

In 1990, Judas Priest ended up in court after the families of Raymond Belknap and James Vance alleged that subliminal messages on the band’s Stained Class album had contributed to their suicide attempts.

The case attracted international attention.

The families failed to prove the alleged messages had caused what happened.

But again, a piece of entertainment had become part of the explanation for something far more serious and complicated.

Dungeons & Dragons went through much the same thing during the Satanic Panic.

After the suicide of her 16-year-old son, Patricia Pulling alleged that Dungeons & Dragons had contributed to his death. She later founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons — BADD — and campaigned against the game, with the organisation linking it to things including witchcraft and suicide.

The association had been made.

And once video games became large enough, they inherited the same role.

After the Columbine massacre in 1999, Doom became part of the public debate about violent entertainment and possible influences on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

They were known to have played the game, so discussing that interest was not invented out of nowhere.

But that still did not make Doom a simple explanation for what happened.

That distinction is important.

Relevant information can be reported without turning correlation into causation.

Grand Theft Auto later found itself at the centre of another attempt to connect games directly to real-world violence.

In 2005, the families of people killed by Devin Moore brought a wrongful-death lawsuit against Take-Two, Sony, Walmart, GameStop and others. The complaint alleged that violent video games supplied to Moore had resulted in “copycat violence.”

Once again, the argument was familiar.

This person consumed this piece of entertainment.

This person then did something terrible.

Therefore the entertainment must somehow help explain it.

Sometimes there may genuinely be evidence that something a person watched, read, heard or played influenced what they did.

That possibility should not be dismissed.

But finding that someone owned a game, listened to a band or watched horror films is not evidence of causation by itself.

Otherwise we are not investigating what happened.

We are searching someone’s hobbies until we find something that looks uncomfortable enough to blame.

Most People Just Enjoy Their Hobbies

There is also something fairly obvious that tends to disappear whenever these conversations happen.

For most of us, these things are just hobbies.

I have watched plenty of horror films. Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Saw and Buddy are all things I have watched.

That gives you masked killers, supernatural murderers, elaborate traps and, in Buddy’s case, a children’s television mascot turned into the centre of a horror story.

If somebody really wanted to build a theory around what I watch, there is plenty there to work with.

I listen to heavy metal as well. Ghost is probably a particularly useful example here, given how deliberately theatrical their satanic and religious imagery can be.

I also watch Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss.

Both lean heavily into demons, Hell, violence, dark humour and material clearly aimed at adults. I enjoy them because I enjoy the characters, humour, music and worlds they have created.

That does not mean I am taking moral guidance from Hell.

And my gaming history gives anyone looking for a convenient explanation even more material.

I have played Resident Evil, Skyrim, Horizon Zero Dawn, Subnautica, The Long Dark, Choo-Choo Charles, Grand Theft Auto and Payday 2.

I also play Mario, Zelda, Diddy Kong Racing, Blast Corps and Banjo-Kazooie.

Then, when apparently none of that is exciting enough, I can quite happily spend an evening cleaning someone’s patio in PowerWash Simulator or driving a lorry across Europe in Euro Truck Simulator.

What exactly is somebody supposed to conclude from that?

If you went through everything I watch, listen to and play looking for something that could supposedly explain my behaviour, you could construct almost any story you wanted.

I listen to Ghost, so apparently the satanic imagery tells you something about me.

I watch Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, so demons and Hell are suddenly relevant.

I have watched Friday the 13th, Halloween and Saw, so fictional killers and violent horror can be added to the file.

I play Resident Evil, so zombies and firearms tell you something.

I play Skyrim, so perhaps swords, dragons and magic do.

Grand Theft Auto gives you crime, violence and car theft.

Payday 2 gives you armed robbery.

The Long Dark gives you survival in the frozen Canadian wilderness.

Subnautica gives you enormous sea creatures.

Choo-Choo Charles gives you a murderous spider-train.

Mario, Diddy Kong Racing, Blast Corps and Banjo-Kazooie presumably complicate the profile somewhat.

And then there is PowerWash Simulator.

The reality is much less dramatic.

I play different games because I enjoy different games.

I listen to music because I enjoy music.

I watch horror because I enjoy horror.

That is it.

Sometimes a Fact Is Just a Fact

You can apply the same faulty logic to almost anything if you try hard enough.

Imagine somebody did something reckless after eating an ice cream.

We would not immediately start examining what flavour it was, how often they ate ice cream, whether they had recently watched videos about ice cream or whether the sugar somehow inspired what happened next.

We would understand that eating an ice cream beforehand does not make the ice cream an explanation.

It is simply another fact about that person’s day.

Yet when the fact happens to involve a violent game, a horror film, heavy metal or an adult animated series full of demons, it suddenly feels significant because it makes for a much more dramatic connection.

That is where I think we need to be careful.

A fact can be true and still be irrelevant.

Interest Is Not Evidence

Knowing what somebody played tells us something about what they enjoyed.

It does not automatically tell us why they behaved a certain way.

If somebody who regularly played EA Sports FC later did something reckless at a football match, we would still need considerably more evidence before deciding the game had anything to do with it.

Simply finding EA Sports FC in their library would not suddenly make it part of the explanation.

The same standard should apply to Skyrim.

Did they talk about Skyrim in connection with what they intended to do?

Did they leave messages suggesting they were trying to recreate something from the game?

Is there any actual evidence connecting the two?

If there is, then report it.

That becomes relevant information.

If there is not, then saying somebody happened to play Skyrim risks turning coincidence into explanation.

And once that connection appears in a headline or article, it has a habit of sticking.

People remember the game.

They remember what happened.

Eventually the question mark between them starts disappearing.

That is how speculation quietly becomes part of the story.

Simple Stories Are Easier to Sell

There is another reason I think these connections keep appearing.

They are simple.

Real people are not.

Someone’s behaviour can be affected by all sorts of things happening in their life: relationships, money, work, isolation, stress, past experiences or personal circumstances that the public may know absolutely nothing about.

There may be one clear explanation.

There may be several.

Sometimes we may never really know.

There may also have been factors in a person’s life, circumstances or decision-making that never become public at all.

That does not mean we should invent those explanations either.

It means reducing a complicated human being to the game they played, the music they listened to or the films they watched is far too simple.

Sometimes we may never know exactly why somebody did what they did.

That uncertainty can be uncomfortable.

But filling the gap with the most dramatic hobby we can find is not the same thing as understanding what happened.

Uncertainty also does not fit neatly into a headline.

“Person played Skyrim” does.

“Person listened to heavy metal” does.

“Person watched violent horror films” does.

Those details are recognisable, easy to explain and easy to turn into something provocative.

That does not mean every journalist making those connections is deliberately trying to mislead people.

But news competes for attention, and a simple, provocative possibility is much easier to package than an honest absence of answers.

“We do not yet know why this happened” may sometimes be the most accurate thing anyone can say.

It is also considerably less dramatic.

That is where the danger comes in.

A hobby becomes a convenient hook.

The hook becomes the headline.

And the headline starts shaping how people understand what happened before there is enough evidence to justify the connection.

Maybe the game mattered.

Maybe the music mattered.

Maybe the film mattered.

But “maybe” is doing a lot of work there.

Reporting the Possibility Is Not the Problem

I do not think the answer is to pretend someone’s interests can never be relevant.

If there is evidence connecting a person’s actions to a game, film, song, book or anything else they consumed, then that evidence is worth reporting.

If somebody explicitly says they were trying to recreate something they saw, that matters.

If they leave messages explaining that connection, that matters.

If investigators uncover something that genuinely establishes a link, that matters.

What matters just as much is being clear about what we do not know.

There is a difference between saying somebody played Skyrim and saying Skyrim influenced what they did.

There is a difference between asking whether something might be relevant and presenting that possibility so prominently that readers naturally start assuming it was.

That is where responsible reporting matters.

Report the evidence.

Report the uncertainty.

And keep the two separate.

Sometimes We Do Not Get a Simple Answer

I think that is probably where I land on all of this.

We naturally want explanations when something disturbing or tragic happens.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions.

There is nothing wrong with investigating someone’s interests if there is a genuine reason to think they may be relevant.

But sometimes the honest answer is simply that we do not know.

That may not be satisfying.

It may not make the strongest headline.

But it is better than taking one recognisable hobby and forcing it into the gap.

Millions of people play violent games without becoming violent.

People watch horror films without becoming killers.

People listen to heavy metal without worshipping Satan.

People play fantasy games without confusing dragons, sabre cats and magic with the real world.

Sometimes people just like things.

A game can be part of somebody’s life without being an explanation for their behaviour.

A film can be something they watched without being a motive.

A song can be something they listened to without being a cause.

If the evidence points towards Skyrim, then report the evidence.

If it does not, then Skyrim is just another game somebody happened to play.

Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby.