Prevalence and Correlates of Problematic Online Gaming: a Systematic Review of the Evidence Published in Chinese

Purpose of Review With the ongoing debate about whether problematic online gaming (POG) constitutes a genuine mental disorder, it is important for all available evidence in the field to be accessible. In this systematic review, we summarize the numerous results related to POG published in Chinese in order to make them more accessible to the international community.
Recent Findings We identified 36 relevant studies published in Chinese (7 epidemiological, 21 related to psychological factors, and 8 related to neurocognitive exploration, involving 362,328 participants in total). According to the literature, the prevalence rates of POG in China range from 3.5 to 17%, which is higher than those reported worldwide. Overall, the data published in
Chinese are consistent with the international literature. Some distinctive findings emerged, however, in particular in relation to familial, scholastic, and social factors; cognitive impairments; and functional changes in neural circuits.
Summary This review is the first to render available articles on POG in Chinese for the international community, which could contribute to the current debate on the status of POG as a genuine mental health condition. Crucially, findings from the Chinese literature often resulted from studies conducted on large random or clinical samples. This is important because a repeated criticism about the recognition of POG as a genuine disorder is the fact that the evidence-based results rely heavily on convenience samples of nonclinical participants.