Step 5 of 5

Step 5 — Settling in: accounts, updates, time and knowing when to stop

The first four steps got you to a working installation. This step is about the months afterwards, and it is deliberately unexciting. Almost everything that goes wrong for beginners in this category goes wrong here rather than at installation, and almost all of it is preventable by four or five small habits.

Keeping the account recoverable

An account in a game of this kind represents everything you have built. There is no copy of it on your computer; the launcher is only a way in. If you lose access to the account, you lose the lot.

Three things keep it recoverable, and all three take a few minutes once.

The recovery address must stay reachable. If the email address you registered with is one you are about to stop using, change it in the account settings now rather than at the point you need it. People change internet providers and lose provider-issued addresses; this is the most common way an account becomes unrecoverable.

Additional sign-in verification should be on if it is offered. This is the second step some services ask for after a password — a code from an app, or sent to you. It is the single most effective thing you can do for any online account. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes free, plain guidance on setting it up and on what to do if an account is taken over.

The passphrase must be recorded somewhere other than your memory. A password manager is the straightforward answer. Paper in a drawer is a perfectly reasonable answer too. The answer that fails is confidence that you will remember it.

One more habit belongs here. Offers of free in-game currency in exchange for your sign-in details are not real, whatever form they arrive in. No legitimate vendor needs your password to give you something. Scamwatch publishes current examples of how these approaches are worded, which is useful reading precisely because the wording changes.

Updates, and why they keep arriving

A game of this kind is updated often — content additions, balance changes and fixes — and the launcher will apply them before it lets you play. This is ordinary and you cannot usefully avoid it.

Two practical points. Updates consume data each time, which matters on a metered connection; if yours is metered, it is worth knowing roughly what a month of updates costs you. And updates consume drive space, sometimes more than the original installation did over time, which is why Step 2 asked for free space rather than exact space.

Keeping your operating system and browser updated matters for the same reason it matters generally, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre's guidance covers it better than a games course can. The only game-specific point is that a launcher refusing to start the game until it has finished updating is behaving correctly.

Playing alongside other people

Most games in this category have some social layer: a group you can join, a chat channel, co-operative activities against a shared opponent. For many players this is the best part of the game and the reason they stay. It is also the part with the most to think about.

Chat with strangers is chat with strangers. The ordinary cautions apply: your real name, your school or workplace, your suburb and your photograph are not required to play, and there is no benefit in supplying them. Treat requests to move a conversation to another platform as a reason for more care, not less.

Every game of this kind has a block function and a report function, and they are worth finding before you need them rather than during an unpleasant conversation. Find them this week.

Where something goes beyond unpleasant — serious online abuse, image-based abuse, or material involving a young person — the eSafety Commissioner is the Australian body that handles complaints of that kind and publishes what it can and cannot act on. If a young person in your household plays, knowing that the eSafety site exists is more useful than any setting inside the game.

The hours, honestly counted

Games built around daily tasks are built to be returned to. That is not a hidden fact; it is the stated design, and for a lot of people it is the appeal — a predictable twenty minutes that is genuinely their own.

The useful habit is counting rather than estimating. For two weeks, write down the finish time whenever you close the game. At the end of the fortnight you will have a number, and the number is almost always different from the estimate. Some people find it is less than they thought and stop worrying. Some find it is more, and then they have something concrete to decide about.

Signs worth noticing in yourself or in someone else are ordinary and not dramatic: logging in out of obligation rather than interest, irritation at being interrupted, the game crowding out something that was previously enjoyed, or returning to it to avoid something else. None of these on its own means anything is wrong. Together, over weeks, they are worth a conversation.

If a household wants a rule, the easiest ones to keep are about place and time rather than minutes. The computer lives in a shared room. The game is not played after a set hour. These are enforceable without anyone having to be a timekeeper.

A sensible first three months

Reviewing the spending rule

Open the account's purchase history, or the email receipts, and add up what was actually spent in the month. Compare it with the number you wrote in Step 3. Do this with the figures in front of you rather than from memory.

If the two numbers match, the rule is working and you need do nothing. If the actual figure is higher, the interesting question is not guilt but mechanism: how was the purchase made, and would a prepaid balance have prevented it? Change the mechanism rather than resolving to try harder.

Keep the receipts. Digital purchases generate records, and any later question about a transaction will turn on them. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sets out consumer guarantees and how to complain about conduct that is misleading, and a kept receipt is the difference between a complaint and a recollection.

Leaving cleanly

Deciding a game is not for you is a normal outcome, and it is cheaper to act on in month one than in month twelve. Leaving properly has four parts.

1. Remove any stored payment method from the account before you stop paying attention to it. This is the part people forget.

2. Cancel any recurring purchase if one was ever set up, and confirm the cancellation in writing by email or in the account, not only on screen.

3. Uninstall both pieces — the game and the launcher. Use the operating system's own remove-a-program screen rather than deleting the folder, so that nothing is left behind.

4. Close the account if you want the data gone, which is a separate action from uninstalling. Uninstalling removes the game from your computer; the account continues to exist with the vendor until you ask for it to be closed.

That last point has an Australian dimension worth knowing. Where a business handles your personal information, Australian privacy law gives you rights to ask what is held and to have it corrected. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains those rights and how to complain if a business will not engage. Whether and how a particular overseas vendor is covered is a question for the OAIC's material rather than for this course.

The household in our example

Where the course ends

This is the last step. You now have an account you can recover, an update habit, a way of counting your own hours, a working review of what you spend, and a clean method for stopping. There is no test, no certificate and no record of you anywhere on this site.

If you want the five checklists on one sheet to keep beside the computer, the All checklists page prints them cleanly on paper. If you want to know how this site is paid for and who writes it, the Affiliate Disclosure and the About page say so in full.