Scientific background: GAS-7 (Gaming)

About this test

The Game Addiction Scale was developed in 2009 by Lemmens, Valkenburg, and Peter for adolescents, based on classic addiction criteria (following Griffiths, among others): salience, tolerance, mood modification, relapse, withdrawal, conflict, and problems. The 7-item short form used here was validated in 2016 by Khazaal and colleagues in large French- and German-speaking samples from Switzerland and showed good internal consistency. Problematic gaming has been listed as "Gaming Disorder" in the WHO's ICD-11 since 2019 as its own diagnosis -- though that requires marked impairment over at least 12 months and a professional evaluation, which this brief screen cannot replace.

Dimensions

Sources & license

• Lemmens, J. S., Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2009). Development and validation of a game addiction scale for adolescents. Media Psychology, 12(1), 77–95.

  Original development of the Game Addiction Scale (source of the 7 criteria used in the short form derived from the original 21-item scale).

• Khazaal, Y., Chatton, A., Rothen, S., Achab, S., Thorens, G., Zullino, D., & Gmel, G. (2016). Psychometric properties of the 7-item Game Addiction Scale among French and German speaking adults. BMC Psychiatry, 16, 132.

  This article, including its supplementary material, is published under the CC BY 4.0 license, permitting unrestricted use and redistribution with attribution. Item wording and response-scale anchors were verified verbatim against this article's Table 1. Note: the only scoring rules this source itself validates are a "monothetic" cutoff (all 7 items rated 4 or 5 = pathological gaming) and a "polythetic" cutoff (at least 4 of 7 items rated 3 or above = at-risk gaming) -- the percentage-based severity bands below are our own construction for a more granular self-reflection result, not an officially published cutoff scale.

  https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-0836-3