Cultural ‘Cognitive Scripts’ in the Kirk Tragedy
In the widespread effort to determine the motive for the public assassination of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10th, the majority of explanations have understandably attempted to uncover the ideological agenda held by the shooter— resulting in a range of assertions and hypotheses entering circulation from the political left and right.
But could the unsettling shooting of Kirk be less about politics and more related to the culture of violent video gaming?
This article probes the possibility.
Washington County Sheriff Nate Brooksby briefs reporters on the establishment of custody in the heinous crime in which Charlie Kirk’s life was taken.
On Sept. 17, Washington County, UT, Sheriff Nate Brooksby stood at a podium to publicly share how a 22-year-old suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk had turned himself in. After emphasizing his office was not the lead agency in the investigation, Brooksby said a friend and former retired corrections deputy contacted him to negotiate a surrender deal by the suspect and his family.
When the suspect arrived at the sheriff’s office, he was greeted by plain clothes detectives to optimize the chance for a peaceful transition into custody. Even with the worry of being caught behind him, he remained fearful of being shot by law enforcement.
”Part of the negotiation and getting him to bring himself in was that we would treat it as delicate and as soft as possible to make him feel comfortable to where he would show up at my office,” Brooksby said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
Given the scale of the crime that had taken place, a level of anxiety on the part of the perpetrator could be expected. But in this situation, the suspect’s fear ran so high that assuaging it became the basis for his own surrender.
What might possibly explain how a person could so casually take another person’s life, but after a 33-hour period of his being pursued, see him only voluntarily relinquish his freedom in exchange for the safeguarding of his own?
Perhaps the cognitive script of heightened threat vigilance— where violent video gamers take steps in their daily lives to deal with the anxiety of an imagined ambush on themselves— is a key part of the explanation. [1]
Might a violent video gamer’s internalized ‘cognitive scripts’ shed light on his peculiar demands for surrender, as well as the nature of the act he is alleged to have committed?
Digital Cultural References About the Criminal Act
Within a day following the attack on Kirk, investigators found evidence containing several cryptic cultural references that might point to an underlying motive. Among the items sorted through by investigators soon after the crime: inscriptions on shell casings with song references, sexual orientation quips, and inklings of videogaming. Then later arrived word of the suspect’s post-crime jocular chats with friends and texts to his romantic partner.
Working with the evidence that was before them, investigators attempted to discern the shooter’s “politics” from the memes and other expressions from the digital realm. But lacking additional contextual clues, they largely came up empty handed.
“It’s very hard to map a political ideology on this mishmash of video game references and hints of different internet subcultures,” said Emerson Brooking, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a former cyberpolicy adviser at the Defense Department.
Tyler Robinson, the suspect in the case, despite having been described as having grown more political by a relative, had never proven to be political in the classical sense. There is no record of his ever having voted, he did not favor— let alone belong— to any political party, and he’d never composed anything remotely approaching a personal manifesto.
Like anyone in the early adult years, he appears to have been solidifying a set of views— ones that happened to clash with the renowned Charlie Kirk— but Robinson hadn’t employed a single traditional political technique to work collectively or independently to advance his ideas.
What Robinson may have been capable of doing, however, was turning to the form of conflict resolution he knew best— the “taking out” of the opposition he had been trained to do in countless video gaming sessions.
Moreover, he may also have helped turn an observation once made by Charlie Kirk into prophecy.
“Our conversation is going to go far and wide, you know. A lot of people are going to see it, a lot of people are going to consume it … because politics and entertainment have begun to overlap.
The old adage is, well, politics is downstream from culture. I think politics and culture are indecipherable from one another now.”
—Charlie Kirk, Podcast “This is Gavin Newsom,” March 6, 2025
An Unwanted Halo Effect
There is at least one digital aspect that offers insight into the tertiary scene of the suspect that hasn’t been openly examined. According to a New York Times article published Sept. 13, a former woodworking classmate of the suspect referred to Robinson as a “massive Halo guy” who also liked to play Call of Duty and other shooter games.
Of the gaming titles Robinson engaged with, Halo centers on a lone elevated marksman fantasy the most. Additionally, Halo is not merely a (FPS) first-person shooter; it is a flagship long-range, single-shot, precision-targeting combat simulator with a highly stable 20-year cognitive and aesthetic schema. [2]
In other words, the cognitive scripting framework Halo provides on sniper shooting bears a striking fidelity to the circumstances of the incident involving Kirk.
Conclusion
For about as long as the Halo gaming franchise has been modeling sniper activity, many in the field of social psychology have insisted that violent video gaming doesn’t result in the committing of lethal violence in the real world.
To say the alleged perpetrator in the Charlie Kirk case transferred a script library learned through endless hours of videogaming to methods and post-incident behaviors appearing in the Kirk case doesn’t suggest gaming caused anything.
What it does say is: without the perpetrator’s application of cognitive scripts, the crime at Utah Valley University might not have happened. The videogames Tyler Robinson practiced did not implant motives, but they still could’ve played heavily into how he carried out a homicide, and also into his reaction afterward— thus qualifying them as significant contributors to the crime on Kirk.
The high-profile crime of Sept. 10th that shook people’s confidence in the time-honored First Amendment was culturally, not politically, driven.
Tyler Robinson’s identity is much less political than cultural in nature. Instead of representing another Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, or anyone in between, the long-practiced violent video gamer turned to what he knew to commit a devastating criminal act against another human being.
As American society continues to grapple with the epidemic of mass and targeted public shootings, it needs to accept that violent video gaming not being the exclusive cause for a shooting is not the same as the activity’s not having a major influence on one.
Notes:
[1] In a form of learned anticipatory cognition, high-exposure players of violent FPS or tactical shooters often develop:
Heightened threat-vigilance scripts that produce excessive real-world fears
A sense of the world as filled with potential hostile engagements
Dread of being shot by hidden law enforcement as a suspect reveals himself
Robinson’s documented fear of being shot during surrender fits thes threat-vigilance script almost perfectly.He behaved as though:
Police snipers would be trained on him
Any misstep would trigger immediate lethal force
Surrender required controlling sight-lines and exposure
[2] The Halo franchise, from Combat Evolved (2001) through Infinite (2021), has consistently centered on:
Long-range single-shot weapons
Tactical elevation and rooftop advantage
Scanning for snipers as an ever-present threat
Instant lethal vulnerability if caught in the open
This is especially striking because:He had just been on a rooftop firing position himself;
Rooftop combat is one of Halo’s most iconic tactical patterns;
His own attack followed a Halo-like structure: elevated attack, precision shot, long distance, planned vantage point;
Having acted out a real-world analog to his game habits, the suspect then appears to have flipped into the complementary game-script position where he became the exposed target in a textbook cognitive transfer of skills or behavior learned in one situation to a new or different context.