Step 5 — The first month and your own limits

Step 5 of 5 · Berth 15-9

The settings worth changing on day one

Every large game ships with a settings screen most players visit once, by accident, three weeks in. Visiting it deliberately on day one takes ten minutes and is the difference between a game that fits your computer and household and one that does not.

Picture quality comes first, and it is the setting your Step 2 sheet was for. If your graphics line was a question mark or a fail, start low rather than high. A game running smoothly at modest quality is a better experience than one running badly at high quality, and you can always raise it.

Chat and voice come second. Most online games let strangers write to you or speak to you by default. Whether you want that is a matter of taste; knowing it is a setting is not. Look for options to restrict messages to people you have added, to mute voice entirely, and to report and block. If there is anyone under eighteen playing, this screen is the one that matters most, and the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on what to look for and how to report harm when a game's own tools are not enough.

Notifications come third. Games send email and desktop prompts about events, offers and things expiring. Turning the promotional ones off, from inside the game and from the account page on the vendor's site, removes most of the manufactured pressure from the experience at no cost.

Finally, look for a purchase confirmation or password-on-purchase option if one exists. It is the cheapest protection against an accidental or impulsive purchase that any game offers.

A spending limit you actually control

In Step 1 you wrote down a maximum for the year. A number on paper is a good start and not a control. A control is something that stops a purchase happening without a second decision.

The most reliable approach is not to store a payment method on the account at all. If each purchase requires you to fetch a card, every purchase is deliberate by construction. This is why Step 4 told you to skip the payment method during setup.

If you prefer to keep a method on file, the next best thing is a prepaid or gift card loaded with your annual figure and nothing more. When it is empty, the limit has been reached, and the limit enforces itself without relying on your judgement at eleven at night.

Whichever you choose, write the first purchase down on the same sheet as everything else: what it was, what it cost in Australian dollars, and the date. Three entries in, you will know more about your own pattern than any general advice could tell you.

Two things to watch for specifically. Recurring charges renew without asking, so put the renewal date in a calendar with a reminder a week before, which is when cancelling is easy. And currency conversion means a price quoted in another currency arrives on your statement as a larger Australian figure, sometimes with a bank fee on top; compare the statement to what you thought you were spending at least once.

The household agreement

If the computer is shared, the most useful thing you can produce at the end of this course is four sentences agreed with the other people who use it. Not a contract — a shared understanding written down once so nobody has to reconstruct it during an argument.

• Who may play, and when. Specific enough to be checkable: which days, roughly which hours.
• Who may spend, and up to what. Including the answer "nobody, without asking", which is the simplest version.
• Who holds the account details. One person, named, with the password in a password manager rather than on paper near the computer.
• What happens if a rule is broken. Decided in advance, calmly, rather than invented in the moment.

For households with anyone under eighteen, the classification and consumer advice you wrote down in Step 3 belong in this conversation, as does whatever you found about randomised purchases. The published classification is the starting point; what you decide beyond it is yours.

A four-point timeline for the first three months

None of these is a test and there is no right answer. The point is to compare what is happening to what you expected, using numbers you wrote before the game had any influence on them.

Patches, seasons and things that change under you

A live game is not a finished product. It is updated, and the updates change things you had already decided about.

Content changes. Something you earned may be reworked, moved or withdrawn, and the account agreement you read in Step 3 almost certainly said so. This is normal and it is not a fault.

Prices and shop contents change. The dollar conversion you worked out in Step 3 may not hold in six months, so it is worth redoing before any purchase rather than assuming.

The requirements can change. A major version may raise the published minimum specifications, which matters most if your Step 2 sheet was already marginal.

And the terms themselves can change. Vendors notify these differently; some email, some show a screen you must accept. When one arrives, the same six searches from Step 3 take five minutes on the new version.

Stopping cleanly

Plenty of people finish this course, install something, play for a month and lose interest. That is an ordinary outcome and the course treats it as one. Stopping well takes about fifteen minutes.

1. Cancel anything recurring first. Before you uninstall, because the cancellation controls usually live in the account area rather than the game, and because an uninstalled game keeps billing.
2. Remove any stored payment method from the account page.
3. Uninstall the game and its launcher through your operating system's normal applications list, not by deleting the folder. Deleting the folder leaves the launcher and its settings behind.
4. Decide about the account. You can leave it dormant, which costs nothing, or ask the vendor to delete it. Which options exist, and what deletion actually removes, was the second question you answered when you opened their privacy policy in Step 3.
5. Turn off the remaining email. Vendors keep sending event notices to dormant accounts; the unsubscribe link in the footer of those emails is the quickest route.

If a vendor makes cancellation or deletion unreasonably difficult, that is the kind of conduct the ACCC publishes guidance about under the Australian Consumer Law, and if the problem concerns personal information specifically, the OAIC publishes material on making a privacy complaint.

The worked example: how it ends

The hypothetical household from the previous four steps reaches the end of the course. This is an illustration of the method, written to show the steps in use. It is not a real family, it reports nobody's experience, and it says nothing about whether any product was good.

On day one they set picture quality to low, in line with the integrated-graphics question mark on their sheet. They restrict chat to added contacts, mute voice, and turn promotional email off from the account page. They find a purchase confirmation setting and switch it on.

Their household agreement runs to four sentences on the back of the same sheet. The fourteen-year-old may play on weekends. Nobody spends without asking. The account sits with one adult, password in the browser's manager. If the weekend rule is broken, the game pauses for a fortnight.

At the end of month one, the bank statement shows nothing, because no payment method was ever attached. At the end of month three, one adult has stopped and the other has not. They leave the account dormant rather than deleting it, and they redo the dollar conversion before considering a purchase, finding it has changed.

Two decisions, both made with numbers they wrote down before they began. That is the entire point of the workbook.