Settling in: spending, time and the people you play with
Step 5 of 5
The first four steps are a single afternoon's work. This one covers the next year, and it is the step where a hobby either stays a hobby or quietly turns into something else. None of what follows is a warning about your character; it is simply the set of habits that make the difference, written down so you can choose them deliberately.
A one-line ledger, in Australian dollars
The single most useful habit is also the dullest: write down every purchase, with the date and the amount in Australian dollars, in one place. A note on the fridge, a page in a notebook, a line in a spreadsheet — the medium does not matter.
It works because purchases in these games are small and frequent, and small frequent amounts are the kind human memory is worst at. Ask anybody what they spent on a game last year and the answer is a guess. A ledger turns the guess into a number, and a number is something you can decide about.
Check it once a month against the figure you agreed in Step 1. If the two disagree, the useful question is which one to change — the figure may have been unrealistic, or the spending may have drifted. Either answer is fine as long as it is chosen rather than discovered.
Why in-game currency makes arithmetic harder
Most games put at least one currency between your money and your purchases. You buy a quantity of points, and you spend points on items. There are usually two or more kinds of points, one earned by playing and one bought.
This is not sinister, but it does make the arithmetic harder, in three specific ways. Bundles are sold in sizes that do not divide neatly into prices, so a small remainder is often left over. The price of an item is displayed in points rather than dollars, which breaks the comparison with anything else you buy. And converting dollars to points happens at a different moment from spending them, so the two do not feel connected.
The remedy is to record the dollar amount at the moment you convert, and to ignore the points entirely in your ledger. You bought dollars' worth of points; that is the transaction.
Recurring charges and where they are cancelled
If you take a subscription or a seasonal pass, find the cancellation screen on the day you subscribe, not on the day you want to stop. Write down where it is. Note also whether the charge is billed by the publisher directly or through a storefront or app store, because that determines whose cancellation screen you need.
Automatic renewal is ordinary and legal. What matters is that you know the renewal date and can stop it in two minutes rather than twenty. If a subscription proves difficult to cancel, or if a charge appears that you did not authorise, the ACCC explains your rights under the Australian Consumer Law and how to complain to the trader first.
Time, and the shape of a session
Online games are built around sessions that do not end on their own. There is always one more match, and the natural stopping points that single-player games have — a chapter, a save point, an ending — mostly do not exist.
So the stopping point has to come from outside the game. The two approaches that work are a fixed number of matches, decided before starting, and a clock in the room where you can see it. Either is better than intending to stop soon.
Pay attention to sleep in particular. An evening session that runs past midnight is the most common way a hobby starts costing something other than money, and it is the easiest to notice early. If a game is routinely displacing sleep, work or people, that is worth taking seriously, and it is a matter for a doctor or a support service rather than for a web page.
The people you play with
Team games put you with strangers. Most are unremarkable. Some are rude, and a few are worse, and every large game has tools for dealing with them: mute, block and report, usually reachable from the player's name.
Use them early rather than enduring. Muting costs nothing and is invisible to the other person. Reporting is how the publisher learns about patterns it cannot otherwise see.
Two things go beyond the game's own tools. If an adult you do not know tries to move a conversation with a young player off the game and onto a private service, that is a safety matter, and the eSafety Commissioner is the Australian body to read and to report to. If somebody offers to sell you currency, an account, or a shortcut outside the game's own shop, treat it as a scam attempt: it is also usually a breach of the terms you read in Step 3, and Scamwatch takes reports.
When something goes wrong
Four problems account for most of what readers of a course like this will meet.
A purchase that did not arrive. Contact the publisher's support first, with the date, the amount and any receipt. If that does not resolve it, the consumer guarantees under Australian law may apply, and the ACCC explains the path.
An account you cannot get into. Use the publisher's own recovery process, from the publisher's own site. This is where the work you did in Step 4 pays for itself.
An account taken by somebody else. Change the email account's password first, because that is usually how it happened, then contact the publisher's support. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance on what to do after an account compromise.
A dispute about personal information. Ask the publisher first. If that goes nowhere, the OAIC is the regulator for privacy complaints in Australia and explains how to make one.
A first year, in six moments
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Account activated, two-factor on, privacy and chat settings applied, ledger started at zero dollars. |
| Week 1 | Decide whether the game is still interesting. Nothing has been spent, so stopping costs nothing. |
| Month 1 | First ledger check against the figure agreed in Step 1. Note the time of day sessions actually happen. |
| Month 3 | Review chat and contact settings, which publishers sometimes reset or extend with an update. |
| Month 6 | Confirm you can still sign in to the registered email address, and that recovery codes are where you left them. |
| Month 12 | Total the ledger for the year. Decide, with that number in front of you, what the next year looks like. |
Leaving well
Stopping is a normal outcome and deserves a plan. Cancel any recurring charge first, and check the renewal date has passed before assuming it is done. Remove any stored payment method. Decide whether to ask for the account to be deleted or simply to leave it dormant — deletion is usually permanent and takes the progress with it, which is an argument for dormancy if there is any chance of returning.
Uninstalling the client frees the disk space and does nothing to the account, which is worth knowing: the two are separate, and only one of them is easy to undo.
The household, at Step 5
The hypothetical household keeps its ledger on the inside of a kitchen cupboard door. At the first monthly check the figure is still zero, because the teenager has not asked for anything and the adults have not offered. Sessions turn out to happen on weekend mornings rather than weeknights, which was not the plan but suits the slow evening connection better.
At month three they find that an update has re-enabled a contact setting they had turned off, which is why month three is in the table at all. The household is an illustration written for this course; it has no name, and it reports nothing about any product's results.
Finishing the course
That is the whole of it. You can now describe how a free-to-play game earns money, check your computer against a requirements list, read the parts of the terms and the privacy notice that affect you, look up an Australian classification, create an account you can recover, and keep track of what the hobby costs in both dollars and hours. Nothing has been bought, nothing has been enrolled in, and nothing is pending.
The All checklists page gathers the six lists in printable form if you would rather work from paper. If something in the course is wrong or out of date, write to us — a correction is more useful to us than a compliment.
Checklist 5 — living with it
- Start a ledger with the date and the amount in Australian dollars for every purchase, however small.
- Record the dollar amount when you convert money into in-game currency, and ignore the points in your ledger.
- Check the ledger against your monthly figure once a month, and change whichever of the two is wrong.
- For any subscription, find and write down the cancellation screen and the renewal date on the day you subscribe.
- Note whether a recurring charge is billed by the publisher or through a storefront.
- Decide a stopping rule before each session: a number of matches, or a clock you can see.
- Watch for sessions displacing sleep, work or people, and treat that as a health matter rather than a gaming one.
- Learn where mute, block and report are, and use them early.
- Treat any offer of currency, accounts or shortcuts from outside the official shop as a scam attempt.
- Every six months, confirm you can sign in to the registered email address and find the recovery codes.
- If you stop: cancel the recurring charge, remove stored payment methods, and decide between deletion and dormancy.