Day 5.

Step 5 — Settling in: time, money, account safety, and leaving well

DEPTH 05 of 05  ·  HAUL 9 checks  ·  CREW you, alone

Step 5 of 5

The first four steps dealt with understanding, hardware, paperwork and setup. This one deals with the part that lasts: what a long-running game does to an ordinary week, and how to keep the decisions about it yours rather than the product's.

None of it is a warning. A game of this type is an ordinary leisure purchase that many people enjoy for years without incident. What follows is simply the housekeeping that makes that outcome more likely, and the exit that makes the other outcome cheap.

Two numbers, written before you are asked

Write down two figures today, while nothing is being offered to you. The first is minutes per day. The second is Australian dollars per month, and zero is a perfectly ordinary answer that a great many players give permanently.

The reason for writing them in advance is simple. Both questions are easier to answer calmly than at the moment they arise, and in these games they arise at the least calm moments: the time question at the end of a session when progress feels near, and the money question immediately after a disappointing random result. A figure decided beforehand is a decision; a figure decided then is a reaction.

A written number also gives you something to check against. “Am I over?” is answerable. “Am I spending too much?” is not.

How an offer is usually put to you

Recognising the standard forms removes most of their pull, because an offer you can name is an offer you can consider.

The starter bundle. A one-off package for new accounts, priced low and presented as better value than anything later. It is designed to convert a non-paying player into a paying one, which is a legitimate commercial aim and worth seeing clearly.

The limited window. An offer with a countdown attached. In a game that runs for years, something similar generally comes round again; urgency is the pricing mechanism, not a fact about scarcity.

The recurring pass. A monthly or seasonal subscription that pays out daily. The daily payout makes the commitment feel smaller than its annual total. Multiply by twelve before deciding, and check whether it renews by itself.

The near miss. A randomised result that lands just short, followed by an opportunity to try again. This is the moment the written figure exists for.

Keeping a one-line record

If you ever spend anything, keep a single line per purchase somewhere outside the game: the date, the amount in Australian dollars, and what it was for. A note file or the back page of a notebook is enough.

In-game purchase histories are often awkward to read and sometimes show only in-game currency rather than money. Your own line does not. It also means that if a charge ever needs querying with your bank or the publisher, the information is already assembled.

The figures above are an empty form, not a record of anything. Fill in your own.

Account safety, in four habits

An account that has had time and possibly money put into it is worth protecting, and the protection is ordinary rather than technical.

1. A unique password. Reused passwords are the usual route by which a game account is lost, because the loss happened somewhere else entirely.
2. Two-factor authentication, if the publisher offers it. Look in the account settings. It turns a stolen password into an inconvenience rather than a loss.
3. No account sharing, selling or buying. Besides generally breaching the terms you read in Step 3, it hands someone else the recovery details.
4. Suspicion of anything that arrives unasked. Publishers do not send messages asking for a password. General advice on keeping accounts and devices secure is published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

If the computer is shared

A desktop in a living area is used by more than one person, and the two things worth settling are separate user accounts on the computer and whether payment details are stored anywhere that another person can reach.

Separate operating-system accounts keep game accounts apart without anyone having to remember to sign out. Removing a stored card from a browser's autofill, or declining to save it in the first place, removes the most common way a purchase happens without the account holder's intention.

Where someone under eighteen uses the computer, the classification entry and its consumer advice from Step 3 are the starting point, and the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for families on games and online services, including how to approach the conversation rather than only the settings.

The three-week review

Put a note in your calendar for three weeks after installation. One evening, before opening the game, answer four questions honestly in writing.

1. Am I inside the two numbers I wrote down?
2. Do I open it because I want to, or because missing a day costs something?
3. Reading the sentence I wrote in the first checklist — why I was curious in the first place — has this delivered it?
4. Is there anything I have stopped doing because of the time this takes?

Three weeks is chosen because the initial generosity described in Step 4 has worn off by then and the ordinary rhythm has established itself. Day three tells you about a marketing plan. Week three tells you about a game.

Any set of answers is a fine result, including stopping. Nothing has been bought that requires justification, and the course has never asked you to finish anything.

If a purchase goes wrong

Three avenues exist, in order, and using them in order is what makes the later ones effective.

First, the publisher's own support, with your one-line record in front of you: the date, the amount in Australian dollars, and what was bought. Most billing errors are resolved here.

Second, your rights as a consumer in Australia. Goods and services supplied to consumers here come with consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law that a business cannot exclude, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sets out what those guarantees cover and what to do when a product is not as described. State and territory consumer affairs offices handle individual disputes.

Third, if the problem was not a billing error but a deception — a site imitating the publisher, an account sold by someone who did not own it, an offer that was never real — Scamwatch is where it is reported. Reporting does not usually recover money and it does contribute to what the National Anti-Scam Centre publishes about current patterns.

Leaving well

Stopping is a procedure like any other, and doing it properly takes a quarter of an hour.

1. Cancel anything recurring first. Uninstalling a program does not cancel a subscription. Find it wherever it was bought — in the game, in a platform account, or with the payment provider — and cancel it there.
2. Uninstall the program. On Windows, through Installed apps in Settings. On macOS, by moving the application to the Bin and then emptying it. On Linux, through whichever package tool installed it.
3. Check free space afterwards against the figure you wrote down in Step 4. A large difference means leftover data that the uninstaller did not remove, usually in your user folder.
4. Decide about the account itself. Terms often allow an account to be closed on request. If you would rather it simply lapse, note from Step 3 what the inactivity clause says will happen.
5. Ask about your personal information, if you want to. Where an organisation is covered by the Privacy Act, you can ask what it holds about you and ask for corrections; the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains how those requests work and what to do if one is refused.
6. Keep your spending record for a while after stopping, in case a renewal appears that you thought was cancelled.

The household in the spare room

Our hypothetical reader writes twenty-five minutes a day and zero dollars a month, puts the three-week review in the calendar, and turns on two-factor authentication in the account settings the same evening.

The starter bundle appears on day two, as expected. Because the figure was already written, the decision takes a few seconds rather than an evening. They also notice the monthly pass renews by itself and write that down, since it is the kind of detail that matters only once.

At three weeks they answer the four questions. Whatever they decide — carry on, cut the daily time, or uninstall and cancel — the written record from five steps means the decision is made on their own information rather than on how the game feels at the end of a session. That is the entire point of the course, and it cost nothing.

Before you finish

That is the whole course. All five checklists are gathered on one printable page if you would like them on paper.

Checklist for Step 5

• I have written a minutes-per-day figure.
• I have written a dollars-per-month figure in AUD, and zero is allowed.
• I can name the four standard forms an offer takes.
• I have somewhere outside the game to keep one line per purchase.
• My account password is not used anywhere else.
• I have turned on two-factor authentication, or checked that it is not offered.
• I have dealt with stored payment details if the computer is shared.
• I have put a three-week review in my calendar.
• I know, in order, what leaving involves: cancel renewals, uninstall, check free space, decide about the account.