Step 3 of 5

Step 3 — Classification, content and in-game spending

This is the step that decides whether a game belongs in your household at all. It covers how Australian classification works, how to look a game up, and how to think about purchases made from inside a game.

How classification works in Australia

Australia classifies computer games through the Australian Classification Board, a statutory body that applies the National Classification Code and the classification guidelines. Films, games and certain publications all pass through the same system, which is why the classification markings on a game look familiar from the cinema.

A classification is a decision about a specific piece of content, published on a public register. It is not an opinion about whether a game is good, and it is not advice about whether your particular child is ready for it. It is a decision about the content, recorded so that the people who buy and supply games know what they are dealing with.

Rather than paraphrase the categories and their meanings here — which would risk getting a legal detail wrong — the sensible move is to read them from the source. The Board publishes the classifications, their markings and the consumer advice that accompanies them at classification.gov.au, along with a searchable database of decisions. Treat that site, not this one, as the authority on what any marking means and on any age threshold attached to it.

Looking a game up yourself

The procedure is the same for any title.

1. Open the Australian Classification Board's site at classification.gov.au.
2. Use its search to look up the game by name.
3. Read the classification itself, and then read the consumer advice line underneath it. The consumer advice is the part that tells you why the decision was made — which elements of content drove it.
4. Check the date and the version the decision applies to.
5. If the game does not appear, note that absence rather than assuming anything from it, and go back to the vendor's own content description.

The consumer advice line is the most useful sentence on the page and the one most people skip. Two games with the same classification can earn it for completely different reasons, and the advice line is where that difference is written down.

What classification does not tell you

Classification covers the content the publisher ships. It does not cover what other players do, and in an online game that is a meaningful gap.

Any game with voice or text chat is, in part, a social space. The people in it are not classified. If the game you are considering has open chat, assume your household will encounter language and behaviour the classification decision says nothing about, and find the game's mute, block and report controls before you need them — ideally in the first session.

Online safety in Australia is the responsibility of the eSafety Commissioner, which publishes guidance for parents, young people and adults, and which accepts reports of serious online harm including image-based abuse and cyberbullying. Its material is at esafety.gov.au. It is worth reading before a problem arises rather than during one.

Classification also tells you nothing about how much the game will ask you to spend, which is the other half of this step.

The shop inside the game

Step 1 established that a free-to-play game funds itself through optional purchases. Here is how those purchases usually work in practice, and what to look at.

Most free-to-play games put a layer of virtual currency between your money and your purchase. You buy a quantity of coins, points or tokens with real money, and then you spend those inside the game. This has two effects worth naming. It obscures the real price of any individual item, because you are no longer thinking in dollars. And it tends to leave a small unspendable remainder in your account, which creates a mild pull towards buying more.

Items on sale fall into recognisable groups. Cosmetic items change only appearance. Convenience items save time you could otherwise spend playing. Content items add something you could not otherwise reach. And randomised items give you an unknown result for a known price, which is a different kind of transaction altogether.

Before you install anything, find the vendor's own description of what it sells and read it. If a vendor does not state how its shop works, that silence is information too, and this course will not fill the gap by guessing.

Randomised items, and why they need care

A randomised purchase is one where you pay a fixed amount for a result you cannot know in advance: a container that might hold any one of a long list of items. Different games give them different names.

The structure is the part that matters. You are paying for a chance, not for a thing. The value of what you receive varies, the desirable outcomes are by design uncommon, and the experience of opening one is built to be exciting whatever comes out. Whether any particular game sells such items is a question for that game's own shop, and this course makes no claim about any specific title.

Two things follow for a household. First, randomised purchases should never be presented to a child as an ordinary part of playing a game; they are a purchase with an uncertain outcome, and that is a distinct thing to explain. Second, if anyone in the household has a history of difficulty with gambling, the structural similarity is close enough to take seriously, and support services exist for exactly that.

If the way a purchase is presented strikes you as misleading — a price or a chance described in a way that does not match what actually happens — the Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct by businesses, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission takes reports at accc.gov.au. If what you have met looks less like a shop and more like a fraud — a site impersonating a game, or an offer of free items in exchange for your account details — that belongs with Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre.

Setting a spending position before you install

The useful moment to decide how much is acceptable is now, while nothing is installed and nothing is exciting. Afterwards, the decision gets made in the middle of a game by whoever is holding the mouse.

A workable position has four parts: an amount per month in Australian dollars, including zero as a legitimate answer; who is allowed to authorise a purchase; where the payment details live, which should not be saved anywhere the game or the browser can reach without a password; and whether randomised purchases are permitted at all, which is a separate question from the dollar figure.

Write it down. A spending position that lives only in somebody's head is not a spending position.

The household has the awkward conversation

The Adelaide household from the earlier steps looks the game up on the national register, reads the classification and, more usefully, reads the consumer advice line underneath it. They talk about whether that content suits their teenager specifically, which is a judgement nobody else can make for them.

Then they open the vendor's page about its shop. They agree on a figure per month, in dollars, and they agree that the adults authorise any purchase. They agree that randomised purchases are off the table for now, and that they will revisit that in six months rather than never.

They also do the small unglamorous thing: they check that no card is saved in the browser on that computer. It takes three minutes and removes the most common way a spending position fails.

Before you move on

You should now know this game's Australian classification and the consumer advice attached to it, know what its shop sells, and have a written spending position agreed with anyone else it affects. Step 4 covers the mechanics of registering an account.