Step 5 of 5

Living with it: updates, spending, other people, time and leaving

The first four steps are a one-off. This one is about the parts that keep happening, and about the part most courses leave out entirely: how to stop.

A fifteen-minute review, once a month

Most of what follows can be handled in a single short review each month, done by whoever holds the account rather than by whoever plays. Putting it on a fixed date — the first Sunday, pay day, whatever is already a habit — is what makes it happen.

Updates, storage and the slow creep

An online game is a moving target. Patches arrive on the company's schedule, add content more often than they remove it, and occasionally change settings. Three habits cover almost all of it.

Let updates install, and let them install promptly. Keeping software current is the plainest piece of advice the Australian Cyber Security Centre gives, and it applies to the game, to the device's operating system and to the browser used to reach the vendor's site.

Watch free storage rather than install size. A device that drops below a few gigabytes free starts behaving oddly in ways that are easy to blame on the game and are not the game's fault.

Re-check settings after large updates. Settings are not usually reset by a patch, but it happens, and a thirty-second look is cheaper than finding out later.

Spending, receipts and refunds

The budget from Step 2 only works if somebody looks at the actual figure. Purchase history is the place to look, and it is usually in the account area on the vendor's site rather than inside the game.

Where in-game currency is involved, count the money spent rather than the tokens received, since the two-step conversion is what makes real spending hard to see. Writing the monthly total next to the agreed figure takes one line in a notebook and ends most arguments before they start.

If something was charged that should not have been — a renewal nobody expected, a purchase a child made, a product that does not do what was advertised — there are two separate avenues. The vendor's own stated process comes first, and it is the fastest. Underneath it sits the Australian Consumer Law, whose consumer guarantees cannot be excluded by a contract term; the ACCC explains what they cover and how to raise a problem with a business. Keep receipts and confirmation emails, because a request supported by a record is a different conversation from one supported by a memory.

For subscriptions, cancel through the same channel you subscribed through, and check afterwards that the cancellation shows in the account. A cancellation you believe you made is not the same as one the vendor recorded.

When something happens with another player

Over a long enough period, somebody in an online game will be rude, pushy, or worse. Deciding in advance what happens next is more useful than hoping it does not.

Inside the game, the tools are usually block, mute and report. Blocking stops contact, muting hides it, and reporting sends it to the company, which has its own conduct rules and acts on them at its own pace. Using all three is reasonable — they do different jobs.

Outside the game, Australia has a regulator. The eSafety Commissioner handles complaints about serious online abuse, including cyberbullying affecting a child and image-based abuse, and publishes guidance on what can be reported and how. If a situation has gone past rudeness, that is the path, and it exists regardless of what the game company does.

The household part is simpler and matters more: the player needs to know, in advance and in plain words, that telling an adult about something unpleasant will not result in the game being taken away as a punishment. A rule that makes reporting costly produces silence.

Approaches aimed at players

Game accounts attract the same approaches as any other account with a payment method attached: offers of free currency, messages claiming an account will be closed, sign-in pages that look familiar, and trades arranged outside the game. Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, publishes current descriptions and a reporting form.

Two household rules handle most of it. Nobody signs in to a game account from a link somebody sent them. And nobody gives an account password to anyone, including someone claiming to work for the game company — a legitimate company does not need it.

Time, and the conversation about it

We are not going to quote a number of hours, because a figure invented here would be worth nothing and we have no basis for one. What is practical is to agree a shape rather than a quota: when the game is played, when it is not, and what has to be finished first.

Shapes that households commonly find workable include a fixed window on particular days, a rule that the device leaves the bedroom at a set time, and an agreement that the game stops before the last hour of the evening rather than at the moment somebody wants to sleep. The last one addresses the only genuinely tricky part, which is that online games are often hard to leave at an arbitrary moment — giving a warning fifteen minutes out works better than ending it mid-session.

The eSafety Commissioner publishes material for families on screen time and games that is written for this conversation, including the point that the content and context of play matter as much as the clock.

Changing device, travelling, or taking a break

Moving to a new device means signing in to the existing account, not making a new one. Second accounts are how purchase histories get lost and how two sets of settings drift apart. Before wiping an old device, confirm the new one signs in.

Travelling can change which servers are reachable and how responsive the game is; that is a property of distance rather than a fault. A break is simply a break — for games without a subscription there is usually nothing to do, and for games with one, cancelling and resubscribing later is generally cheaper than paying through months nobody played.

Leaving properly

Closing an account well takes about twenty minutes and is worth doing in order.

Cancel any subscription first, and confirm the cancellation appears in the account. Then remove the stored payment method, if there is one. Then download or note anything you want to keep, such as receipts. Then use the vendor's account closure process, which is usually described in the privacy notice or the account settings rather than advertised.

Finally, there is the information the company holds. An organisation covered by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) is required to deal with requests for access to, and correction of, personal information it holds about you, and the OAIC explains how those requests work and what to do if one is refused. Whether a particular overseas vendor is covered depends on facts about that vendor; what you can always do is read what its privacy notice says about deletion and ask using the contact point it gives.

Then uninstall the client and take the storage back. That is the whole course.