His new study has found that people who play these games tend to see their opponents, and even themselves, as "lacking in core human qualities such as warmth, open-mindedness and intelligence."
Maybe that is because their opponents ARE lacking in such qualities! They are robots! Artificial beings!
What kind of person would find the Combine "warm, open minded and intelligent"?!?!?
Even in the game universe they are mindless clones (or something worse), and in practice they are a simple string of computer code, that never comes close to replicating the complexity of a small animal like a house fly let alone a full person! And what is true for Combine is true for most of the antagonists in video games, they mindlessly attack according to a relatively simple algorithms of fire and manoeuvre. They may attack with unyielding ferociousness or with animal cunning but no true intelligence, they can't imagine what you are thinking, they fundamentally lack a theory of mind. They cannot be reasoned with. They are autonomatons.
"and even themselves"
If you ask enough people of any group you could get "even a few" to admit they aren't really open minded, not really that nice and not really that smart. He keeps using the term "humanised" and "dehumanised" without clarification, context or meaning. They obviously are still human physically, they aren't mutating into cats or frogs. The term "Dehumanisation" is used in application to things like slavery, but applied to oneself it loses meaning. Considering the affection and love people feel for non human things like their pet dogs who they would never allow to come to harm, what significance does a term like "humanisation" mean?
Especially with gems like "Ratings of other people's humanity". How do you RATE "humanity"?!!?? I didn't know there was a scale. And precisely what are people rating, are they rating the "humanity" of themselves in everyday life, or are they rating their perception of the 2D spite in a 20 year old beam em up?!?!!!!
Why won't he go into detail and get beyond vague histrionics?
"The specifics of the study weren't revealed"
Ah. That's not how science works. That's how religion works.
