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.
Khazaal and colleagues' 2016 validation study tested the short form on a very large Swiss sample (3,318 French-speaking and 2,665 German-speaking men) and found satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .85) and a single-factor structure in both language groups. One thing worth noting: that validation sample was exclusively male -- how well these figures generalize to women or non-binary people wasn't examined in that study.
Dimensions
Problematic Gaming Behavior
Number of items rated "Sometimes" or higher (0–7). The original study (Lemmens et al., 2009) flags at-risk gaming at 4 or more of the 7 items.
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. The scale below uses this source's own "polythetic" cutoff: at least 4 of 7 items rated "Sometimes" or above indicates at-risk gaming. A stricter "monothetic" cutoff (all 7 items rated 3 or above) also appears in the literature but is not what's used here.
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-0836-3
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