The number of online game players, particularly the youth, has been growing rapidly in China because of the proliferation of the online gaming industry. The excessive use of online games has resulted in an increasing number of pathological online game users or addicts. The large number of addicts is causingsocial problems, such as school failure and broken family and social relationships.Online game addiction has received increased attention from scholars in the field of pedagogical and public health. However, measuring the online game addiction remains a controversial issue because the current instruments to diagnose online game addicts vary greatly and the survey results are not consistent.The study is to develop a 13-item instrument, named Online Game Addiction Scale, to diagnose online game addiction. We examined the validity of initial scales by testing the survey instrument with two groups of subjects, consisting of the addict and the control groups. Subjects in the control group are healthy Internet users. However, determiningif a person would be an online game addict was a challenge because a commonly recognized scale to diagnose the illness did not exist. In order to overcome the challenge,we first selected a group of online game addicts, who were receiving the treatment of Internet and online game addiction, from the Hangzhou 7th People Hospital. The addict group consists of 10 serious patients who took almost all time to play online games at the expense of eating and sleeping hours. The control group consists of 10 healthy students from Zhejiang University who never played online games.In order to confirm that the chosen subjects are qualified addicts, we employed the Event-Related Brain Potentials ( ERPs )technique, and the addiction Stroop task, a modified Stroop task, to record the Electroencephalogram and ERPs. The confirmatory analysis showed that the addict group had significantly larger P300 amplitudes and LPP values than the control group. After receiving a positive confirmation about the qualification of subjects in the addict group, we employed the initialOnline Game Addiction Scale with 20 subjects of both groups and developed the 13-item Online Game Addiction Scale based on the consistency of results across subject categories. We tested again the survey instrument with 17 new subjects, including 9 subjects in the addict group from Hanghzou 7thPeople Hospital and 8 subjects in the control group from Zhejiang University. Our final Online Game Addiction Scale enabled us to obtain a perfect classification of subjects according to their testing scores. Subjects diagnosed as online game addicts based on our survey instrument were all from the addict group. Subjects diagnosed as healthy Internet users were identical subjects in the control group. We tested all the subjects twice and obtained a high test-retest reliability of the final Online Game Addiction Scale.%在我国网络游戏产业发展迅猛,网民数量持续高速增长,但同时也出现了网游玩家沉迷于网络游戏中而产生心理依赖的成瘾症状.目前对网络成瘾的概念、界定指标和测量工具都存在较大争议,缺乏网络成瘾界定的系统研究.本研究在以往多种量表的基础上,采用事件相关脑电位方法,采用成瘾Stroop实验范式,找到了可以区分网络游戏成瘾者和正常网络使用者的客观电生理指标,验证了这个分类.通过对这群已经被验证了的两组被试的问卷测量,形成了"网络游戏成瘾量表",并依据测量结果,给出了推断被试是否成瘾的总分分界值.然后,采用重测信度方法,验证了量表的稳定性和可靠性.最后,用测量预留的成瘾被试,验证了"网络游戏成瘾量表"的有效性.
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