Critique Essay
A Critique of “Video Games Do Affect Social Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of the
Effects of Violent and Prosocial Video Game Play”, by Tobias Greitemeyer and Dirk O. Mügge
While researching my topic, I found several interesting articles that fit the standards of the
CRAAP test. The one that stood out the most due to its abundance of information, data charts,
and many quotes from different people or places is the article “Video Games Do Affect Social
Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of Violent and Prosocial Video Game Play”.
The article goes into depth on the common debate that playing certain types of video games
affects one’s social behavior. The article presents current research that proves through a metaanalytical test that was completed that certain video games do have an affect on social outcomes.
The data was spread across 98 different studies and had a total of 36,965 people that took part in
these independent studies. The studies showed significant evidence that both violent games and
prosocial games have an affect on social behavior or outcome. The associations between video
games and social behaviors showed that violent video games were closely associated with
increasing aggression and decreasing prosocial outcomes, while prosocial games would decrease
aggression and increase prosocial outcomes. The results were similar and reliable across the
experimental, correlational, and longitudinal studies, which shows that some videogames may
affect social outcomes and could potentially have short- and long-term effects.
I believe this article has many strong points. The authors succeeded at giving very specific
details about the experiments or tests that were completed. I liked how the authors included
charts that visually show all the data collected throughout the several studies. I found it very
helpful that the article was very neatly organized, making it easier and clearer to read.
The author, Tobias Greitemeyer, gives many examples of studies that defy the recently
proven data, such as “there are also studies that fail to find that prosocial video games increase
helping or that violent video games increase aggression. Some studies even suggest that violent
video game play decreases aggression. Critics of the idea that video game play significantly
affects social behavior argue that video game experiments often suffer from poorly matched
video games, in that games that are employed in a neutral condition differ from the games in the
violent or prosocial condition on a variety of variables (such as difficulty or frustration) other
than violent or prosocial content.”
You can easily tell that the authors of the article have done their research on the various
studies and they are practically experts on the topic. They both work at the University of
Innsbruck, Austria. You can see that the authors are personally interested in the topic through
their writing.
I believe that “Video Games Do Affect Social Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of the
Effects of Violent and Prosocial Video Game Play” is a decent article that provides plenty of
descriptive information on studies that might interest anyone on the topic of video games affects
on social behavior.