Step 1 of 5
What playing an online game actually involves
Before you can decide anything, you need a picture of what is being asked for. This step takes the phrase “an online game” apart into the five separate things it stands for, so that the rest of the course has something to work with.
The five parts of “an online game”
When somebody in your household says they want to play an online game, they are asking for five things at once, and the five are not equally significant. Taken separately they are: an account with a company, a program on a device, a connection to that company's computers, contact with other people, and a relationship with money. Most of the worry people bring to this subject attaches to one or two of those five. Most of the practical decisions attach to the other three.
Pulling them apart is worth the ten minutes because the parts are independent. A game can involve an account and no money. It can involve money and almost no contact with other people. It can involve a great deal of contact with other people and a very small program. Lumping them together as “a game” makes it impossible to say what you are agreeing to.
- Account
- A record held by the game company that identifies one player, usually by an email address and a password.
- Client
- The program installed on your device that draws the game and sends your actions to the company.
- Server
- A computer run by the company that holds the shared game world and decides what is true in it.
- Patch or update
- A download that changes the client after it is installed, usually to fix faults or add content.
- In-game purchase
- A payment made inside the game, after installation, for something that exists only in the game.
The account
An account is a record the company keeps about one player. At a minimum it holds an email address and a password. It may also hold a display name, a date of birth, a country, and, if money has changed hands, some record of payments.
Two things follow from that, and they are the reason this part comes first. The first is that an account is a relationship with a company, not a possession. The company decides the rules of the account, can suspend it under those rules, and in most cases states in its terms that the account itself is licensed to you rather than owned by you. Step 3 shows you where to find that paragraph.
The second is that the email address and password used for the account matter more than anything else in this course. If a password is reused from somewhere else, a breach somewhere else becomes a problem here. The Australian Cyber Security Centre's guidance on passwords and multi-factor authentication applies to a game account exactly as it applies to a bank — the account is worth something to somebody, if only because it may have a payment method attached.
If the person playing is a child, there is a third point. The account will be in somebody's name, with somebody's email address and somebody's date of birth, and whoever that is carries the practical consequences. Deciding this consciously, before anyone types anything, is the whole purpose of Step 2.
The client: what gets installed
The client is the program that runs on your device. On a desktop or laptop computer it is usually installed once and then updated repeatedly; on a phone or tablet it comes from the device's app store and updates the same way other apps do; in a few cases the game runs inside a web browser and nothing is installed at all.
Three practical facts about the client are worth knowing before you start.
It takes space, and the space it takes grows. A game that installs at a few gigabytes may be considerably larger a year later, because updates add content more often than they remove it. If the device is nearly full now, it will be a problem later rather than today.
It downloads, repeatedly. Installation is one large download. After that, patches arrive on the company's schedule rather than yours, and some of them are large. On a connection with a monthly data allowance, this is a real cost that people forget to count.
It should come from the vendor or an established store, and from nowhere else. A game client obtained from a search result, a file-sharing site or a link in a message is the single most common way an unwanted program reaches a home computer in this category. That is a general statement of good practice, not a claim about your device, which we know nothing about.
The servers, and why the game needs them
An online game keeps its world on the company's computers rather than yours. Your client draws the picture and sends your actions; the servers decide what happens and tell every other player's client about it. That arrangement is what makes the game shared, and it has four consequences that surprise people who last played something that came on a disc.
The game needs a connection to be playable at all. Not a fast one, usually, but a present one. If the household internet goes out, the game goes out with it.
The company can change the game at any time, without asking, because the game is on its machines. Content can be added; content can also be removed.
The game can end. A company can close a game's servers, and when it does, the game stops existing for everybody. This is normal in this category rather than exceptional, and it is the reason the budget conversation in Step 2 is framed around money you are willing to have spent rather than money you are investing.
Your activity is visible to the company in a way that offline software is not. What that company records and keeps is set out in its privacy notice, which is the subject of Step 3.
Other people
The word “online” in “online game” usually means other human beings are in the same world at the same time. Depending on the game, contact with them can run from almost nothing — seeing other characters move past — to open text or voice conversation with strangers.
This is the part most households have views about, and it is the part most likely to be adjustable. Many online games provide settings that limit who can send messages, who can invite, and whether chat appears at all. Where those settings live varies by game; Step 4 includes finding them as a step in the general setup procedure.
Australia has a regulator for this area. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for parents and carers about online games and social features, and operates reporting schemes for serious online abuse and image-based abuse. If contact with other players is the thing you are weighing up, that material is written by people whose job it is, and it costs nothing to read.
The ways money enters
Payment in this category takes a small number of recognisable shapes, and knowing which shape applies tells you most of what you need about the financial side.
| Shape | What it means | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| One-off purchase | You pay once to obtain the game. | Whether further payments are possible later. |
| Subscription | A recurring charge, monthly or yearly, that continues until cancelled. | How cancellation works and when it takes effect. |
| Free to install, paid inside | Nothing to begin, with optional purchases in the game. | How purchases are authorised on the device. |
| In-game currency | Real money buys tokens; tokens buy items. | The two-step conversion makes real cost harder to see. |
| Randomised items | A payment yields an unknown item from a set. | Cost is unpredictable by design; see the note below. |
Where a game sells randomised items for real money, treat it as a question for the household rather than a detail. The Australian Classification Board classifies computer games sold in Australia and publishes classifications and consumer advice on its register; that register is the place to check what a particular game has been given, rather than any figure we could quote. Nothing in this course presents paid randomised items or simulated gambling as suitable for children.
What this does not involve
It is as useful to know what is not happening. Installing a mainstream online game from the vendor or an established store is not, in itself, a security incident, and nothing on this page is a statement about the condition of your device — we cannot see it and would not want to. There is no deadline here, no risk created by reading slowly, and no requirement to buy any product, from us or anyone else, in order to be safe.
Equally, signing up is not permanent. Accounts can be closed, subscriptions can be cancelled and payment methods can be removed; Step 5 covers all three. The purpose of reading first is simply that it is easier to decide these things calmly before an account exists than afterwards.
You should now be able to say, about any game you are considering: whether it needs an account, whether it installs something, whether it needs a live connection, whether other people are present, and which payment shape it uses. If any of those five is still blank, that blank is a question for the vendor's own site, and Step 3 shows you where the answers usually sit.
- Write down the exact name of the game being asked for, from the vendor's own site rather than from memory.
- Note whether it needs an account, and whose email address that account would use.
- Note whether it installs a program, and on which device.
- Note the approximate install size and whether the device has that space free.
- Note whether a live internet connection is needed to play at all.
- Note whether other players can send messages, and whether that can be limited.
- Identify which payment shape applies, from the table above.
- Note whether randomised paid items are part of it.
- Look the game up on the Australian Classification Board register and write down what you find.
- Leave the decision until Step 2. Nothing is signed up for today.