Pets and screens have existed in parallel universes for decades: a cat might sleep on the TV, but almost never look at it. Today, the situation has turned so upside down that the red cat is ready to personally climb into the keyhole and pull out broken master keys.
One of the players posted a short video in which his cat is trying to help the mini-game from Skyrim – picking the lock. Every time the master key breaks with a characteristic click, the animal hits the screen with its paw, and then looks down in confusion, looking for the fallen piece of iron on the floor. Those who were attentive noticed that the character’s hacking was leveled up to level 86, and there were about a hundred lockpicks in his inventory, so it was clearly not by chance that they broke. The player did not hide this, directly admitting that he deliberately damaged the master keys in order to play with the cat.
The animal’s reaction is explained technically, and the explanation is more curious than it seems. In cats, the flicker fusion threshold is higher than that of humans, approximately 70–80 hertz versus our 50–60, and old televisions with a cathode ray tube at a frequency of 50–60 Hz looked to them like a twitching spot of light without a clear picture. Modern LCD and OLED panels work on the frame-hold principle and produce 60-120 hertz, so that for a cat’s vision, the image has finally turned into real moving objects.
Add sound to this, and you have a ready-made hunting trigger. Cats are great at linking specific noises with specific events, and the click of a master key in Skyrim works exactly the same as the creaking of a refrigerator door or the rustling of a bag of food. In the comments, they remembered similar stories: someone’s cat runs to the TV from the first click of a hack, and someone’s previously attacked hockey players, since the silhouettes are perfectly visible on the white ice.
Skyrim fans continue to argue about which style of play is more effective and entertaining – the stealth archer or the secretive throat cutter
The only residue left was from the voice acting. The video was equipped with a synthetic voice in the style of TikTok, and the community unanimously asked to rid them of this happiness, after which a second version of the video appeared – with the same master keys, the same cat, but in silence.
In the lore of the series, Khajiit are considered natural thieves, and this cat only needed one broken master key to become an apprentice.
