Game Addiction: A Brief Review

Maria Hafeez, Muhammad Dawood Idrees, Jung Yong Kim

Abstract: During recent years gaming addiction has received increased attention from psychologist, psychiatrist, parents, teachers, media, and mental health organizations, to some extent, by gamers all over the world. Some researchers use the terminology of problematic or excessive game usage instead of disorder to denote the harmful use of video game playing. Based on published empirical studies, most of them from early 2000 to date, it appears that excessive game play or game addiction have potentially damaging effects on individuals, in the same way as other traditional addictions, including substance use addictions. Moreover, there is no uniform, psychological or physiological screening criteria available and field has been hindered by use of inconsistent and non-standardized criteria to detect mobile game addiction. Most of the recruitment methods have serious sampling biases with over reliance on self-selected samples. Clearly there exist a gap in current established understanding of gaming addiction. There is a need of epidemiological research to determine the occurrence and prevalence of clinically significant problems that are associated with gaming addiction, to ensure recovery and treatment in a better way briefly discussed in this review.

Keywords: Game Addiction, Psychophysiology, Flow, Behavioral Addiction