Living with it: updates, money, time and other people

Games in this category are updated continuously. That is the point of a live online game, and mostly it is a benefit, but it has two practical effects on a household.

The first is storage. An installation that fitted comfortably in January is tighter in December, because updates generally add more than they remove. The margin you kept in Step 2 is what absorbs this. Once a year, check how much space the installation now occupies and how much the drive has left, and do it before an update rather than during one.

The second is the download. Large updates arrive on the publisher's schedule, not yours, and they arrive at the moment you wanted to play. If your connection has a monthly data allowance, the habit worth building is to let the client update at a time of your choosing — most clients will download an update when launched and left alone — rather than discovering a thirty-minute wait when you had forty minutes free.

A third, smaller point: an update can change how a game performs on your machine. If a title that ran well stops running well after a patch, that is a normal thing to happen and a normal thing to raise on the publisher's own support channel, where other players will be reporting the same.

The free-to-play model does not ask for a large payment; it asks for many small ones, each of which is individually easy to justify. The defence is not willpower in the moment. It is a number decided in advance, in Australian dollars, when nothing is on offer.

Pick a figure you would be content to have spent at the end of the month even if you stopped playing the next day. Zero is a legitimate figure and a common one. Then make the number real with three mechanics:

• Keep the payment method out of the account. An account with no stored card requires a deliberate act for each purchase, and a deliberate act is exactly the friction you want.
• Check the actual total monthly, from your own bank or card statement rather than from the game's purchase history. Your statement is the complete record, in AUD, including currency conversion where it applies.
• Separate the randomised-item decision as Step 3 set out. A limit that quietly becomes a budget for randomised purchases is not doing the job you set it.

If an amount in a foreign currency appears on a purchase screen, remember that the figure on your statement will include conversion and may include a fee from your card issuer. The ACCC publishes consumer guidance on online purchases and on your rights when something is not delivered as described.

Where a person under eighteen plays, the arrangement that works is the simple one: the payment method belongs to an adult, purchases are asked for rather than made, and the monthly figure is known to everyone. Nothing about this requires a product or a subscription to enforce; it requires the card not to be in the account.

A match in this category is short, which is a genuine advantage and also the mechanism by which two hours disappear. There is rarely a natural stopping point, because the next match is always three minutes away and always short.

Two habits supply the stopping point the game does not. Decide the number of matches before you start, not the amount of time — "four matches" is a thing you can count while playing, where "an hour" is not. And put the session before something else in the evening rather than after everything, so that the end of it is defined by the next thing rather than by fatigue.

For a household with a younger player, a conversation about when and how long tends to work better than a technical control, for the plain reason that it survives the player learning how the technical control works. Most desktop operating systems do offer screen-time and account controls, and they are worth knowing about; they work best as a shared agreement made visible rather than as a surprise.

The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on gaming, including how to talk about time and about what to do when something goes wrong online. It is written for Australian households and it is not selling anything.

A team game puts you among strangers, and the ordinary range of human behaviour follows. Most sessions are unremarkable. Some are not, and knowing in advance where the controls are makes the difference between an irritation and an evening ruined.

Before you need them, find three things in the game's settings: how to mute an individual player, how to turn off chat entirely or restrict it to your own team, and how to report behaviour to the publisher. They are usually within one or two screens of each other, and the five minutes of looking is best spent on a calm evening.

Muting is not a defeat and reporting is not an escalation; both are ordinary maintenance. For behaviour that goes beyond the game — serious abuse, threats, or harm directed at a person, particularly a young person — the eSafety Commissioner is the Australian regulator that takes reports and explains what can be done. For an attempt to take money or credentials from you, Scamwatch is the reporting point.

One guideline that covers most situations: nothing identifying belongs in a game chat. Not your full name, your school or workplace, your suburb, your other account names, or anything that lets a stranger find you elsewhere.

An account you have played for a year is worth more than the one you made in Step 4, which makes it a more attractive target and makes a lapse more expensive. Three checks, once or twice a year, cover most of it.

Confirm that two-step verification is still switched on, since it is occasionally dropped by an account change. Confirm that the recovery email address is still one you control, which is the item people most often lose. And confirm that the passphrase has not quietly been reused elsewhere in the meantime, which is the most common way a game account is lost without anyone attacking it.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre maintains general advice on securing personal accounts and on recognising phishing. None of this implies anything is wrong with your computer or your account; it is the same sort of maintenance as checking a smoke alarm.

This table describes a pattern commonly seen in live service games and is offered as general guidance, not as a prediction about any particular title.

Most people stop playing a game by drifting away from it, which leaves an account with a password somewhere and an email address attached. That is usually harmless and occasionally not. Stopping deliberately takes twenty minutes.

Remove any stored payment method from the account. Uninstall the client if you want the disk space back, remembering that uninstalling the client does not close the account. If you want the account closed, the publisher's own account settings or support channel is where that is requested, and the publisher's privacy notice should say what is retained afterwards and for how long.

If a request to delete your personal information is not answered, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains the rights that apply under Australian privacy law and how to make a privacy complaint. That is the correct destination for a privacy question, as opposed to a consumer one.

Our hypothetical household sets its monthly figure at a modest amount in AUD and writes it on the same piece of paper as the two decisions from Step 3. No card is stored in the account. The thirteen-year-old asks when a purchase is wanted; the adult checks the figure and the statement.

They agree on a number of matches rather than an amount of time, and they find the mute and report controls on a quiet evening before they need them. At six months one adult checks the free disk space; at twelve months both confirm two-step verification is still on and that the recovery address still works.

This household has done the whole course without spending anything they did not decide to spend in advance, which is the outcome the five steps are arranged to produce. They remain an invented illustration throughout.