Step 5 of 5

Step 5 — Settling in: time, money, and getting help

The first week of a new game answers itself. This step is about the months after that: keeping the hobby in proportion, knowing where your money actually went, and knowing who to ask when something goes wrong.

What the first month usually looks like

New players of an online game tend to pass through a recognisable sequence, and knowing the shape of it makes each part less surprising.

The first few sessions are mostly learning which button does what. Progress is fast because everything is new, and the game is generally designed to make these hours feel generous. In a game built around constructing vehicles, as this course's worked example is, the early hours are also spent discovering that the building part and the fighting part are two different skills.

Somewhere in the second or third week the pace changes. The obvious progress has been made, the remaining goals take longer, and the shop starts to look more relevant than it did on day one. This is the ordinary rhythm of the category rather than a trick, but it is the point at which the spending position you wrote in Step 3 earns its keep.

By the end of the first month most people know whether they are still interested. That is a useful moment to stop and compare the game with the sentence you wrote for yourself in the Step 1 checklist, about what you wanted out of it.

Time, honestly measured

Nearly everyone underestimates how long they have played. The fix is not willpower, it is measurement, and three habits do most of the work.

Decide when you will play rather than how long. "Weeknights after dinner, not after ten" is a rule you can keep. "About an hour" is not, because an hour has no edge to it and a session usually ends at a natural pause the game chooses.

Use the clock in the corner of your screen, or an alarm in another room. Many games show how long an account has played in total; it is worth looking at that number once a month, with no judgement attached, simply so the figure in your head matches the figure on the screen.

Watch for the parts of the design that extend sessions without you deciding to: a reward for logging in daily, a timed event ending tonight, a progression track that resets at the end of a season. None of these is a reason to stop playing. They are reasons to notice that the session you are in was not entirely your idea.

Money, honestly measured

Step 3 asked you to set a position before installing anything. Step 5 asks you to check, every month or two, whether reality matched it.

The reliable record is your bank or card statement, not your memory and not the game's own history. Look for the game's publisher or its payment processor by name, and add up the amounts in Australian dollars. The figure is sometimes a surprise, which is exactly why the exercise is worth doing.

Watch for three specific things. Recurring charges you have forgotten about — some games sell a monthly pass that renews. Charges from a household member, which is a conversation rather than a dispute. And charges you genuinely do not recognise, which should go to your bank promptly and may also be worth reporting to Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au.

If you bought something and it did not work, or was not what the seller described, the Australian Consumer Law gives consumers guarantees that apply to digital products as well as physical ones. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explains those guarantees and how to complain at accc.gov.au. Start with the seller, keep the correspondence, and escalate if the seller will not engage.

Updates, changes and the game you did not install

Step 1 established that an online game is a service, and a service changes. In practice this means two things you should expect rather than resent.

The client updates, often, and sometimes the update is large. Keep enough free space on the drive for it, and expect to wait occasionally when you had planned to play.

The game itself changes too: parts are rebalanced, modes are added or retired, and the shop's contents rotate. If you have spent money on something and the thing later changes, the publisher's terms describe what you are entitled to. Read them once, calmly, so you are not reading them for the first time while annoyed.

A third category is worth a sentence. Add-ons, mods and third-party tools written by other players exist for many games and vary enormously in quality and intent. Treat anything that asks for your account details as a threat regardless of how it is presented, and prefer whatever the vendor itself sanctions. The Australian Cyber Security Centre's general advice on downloading software safely is at cyber.gov.au.

The other players

An online game is a room full of strangers, most of whom are unremarkable and a few of whom are not. Two practical positions make the room easier.

Keep your personal details to yourself, including your surname, your school or workplace, your suburb and your photographs. This sounds obvious written down, and it is routinely ignored in a friendly voice chat six months in.

Use the mute, block and report controls early and without hesitation. They exist precisely so that one unpleasant person does not become your problem to manage. If behaviour towards you or a young person in your household crosses into serious harm — threats, image-based abuse, sustained bullying — the eSafety Commissioner at esafety.gov.au is the Australian body that accepts those reports and explains what it can do.

Where to take a problem

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, at oaic.gov.au, is the national privacy regulator; its complaints process expects you to raise the matter with the organisation first.

Stopping well

Most people stop playing a particular game eventually, and there is no ceremony required. But a few minutes of tidying saves trouble later.

Cancel anything recurring before you uninstall, because removing the client does not cancel a subscription. Remove any saved payment method from the account. If you want the account closed rather than dormant, look for the account deletion option in the vendor's own settings or policy, which also tells you what it keeps and for how long. And uninstall the client from your computer in the ordinary way rather than deleting its folder, so the removal is complete.

If you come back in a year, the account will be there, the game will have changed, and the four numbers you wrote down in Step 2 will need checking again. That is the whole cycle.

The household, six months on

The Adelaide household from the earlier steps has a rule about weeknights, a figure per month that has been spent twice and not spent four times, and a card that is not saved on the machine.

One month a charge appears that nobody recognises. They check the statement, work out it was a renewal of something bought in the second month, and cancel it. It takes twenty minutes, mostly because they had to find the account settings.

That is what settled looks like. Not the absence of problems — the presence of a routine that finds them in twenty minutes.

You have finished the course

You can now explain how a free-to-play game funds itself, check your own computer against a requirements list, look up an Australian classification and read its consumer advice, register an account without handing it to a stranger, and keep time and money in proportion afterwards. That is the whole of what this course set out to do.

The checklists from all five steps are gathered on one page, formatted to print on paper.