Step 5 of 5

Your first sessions, settings and habits

The last step is about the twenty minutes after the game first opens, and the three months after that. Settings first, people second, and then an honest way of deciding whether this is worth your time.

The first twenty minutes

Most people open a new game and press whatever the big button is. There is a better order, and it costs about five minutes.

Before the first match

Open the settings menu before anything else. Every setting discussed below lives there, and it is far easier to find it now than mid-session.
Set the picture quality low. You can raise it later. Starting low tells you what the machine can do comfortably.
Set the audio to something you can live with. Game audio is often loud by default, and voice chat is a separate slider.
Go through the privacy and chat settings deliberately. Decide who can message you, who can see your profile, and whether voice chat is on.
Find where reporting and blocking live. Knowing where they are before you need them is the whole point.
Play the tutorial if there is one. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the basic activity of the game appeals to you.
Stop after the first session and notice how you feel about it. This sounds soft, but it is the most reliable signal you will get.

Picture settings, and why to start low

A game's default settings are a guess about your hardware, and the guess can be wrong in either direction. Starting low and raising settings one at a time is slower but it tells you which setting is responsible for a problem.

Three settings carry most of the weight on older machines: resolution, shadow quality and any kind of anti-aliasing. If a session stutters, those are the first three to lower. A frame-rate limit, if the game offers one, can also make a session feel steadier than an uncapped rate that fluctuates.

If you noted your graphics hardware in Step 2, this is where that note earns its keep. Integrated graphics in particular benefit from a lower resolution more than from any other change.

Privacy and communication settings

An online game is a public place by default. Most games let you change that, and the settings are usually grouped under privacy, social or account.

Work through four questions. Who can send you a direct message or a friend request — everyone, friends of friends, or nobody? Who can see your profile and your activity? Is voice chat on by default, and do you want it on? And is your display name something you are content to have visible to strangers, keeping in mind that a name matching one you use elsewhere connects the two.

There is no single correct set of answers. A person playing with friends wants different settings from a person playing alone. The point is that the defaults were chosen by the studio for its purposes, and five minutes of deliberate choosing replaces them with yours.

One thing worth doing on day one

Check whether your display name, your account email and any name you use on other services are the same or obviously related. If they are, and you would rather they were not connected, the cheapest time to change it is now, before anyone has learned either.

Other players, and what to do about them

Online multiplayer means strangers, and strangers vary. Most are unremarkable. Some are rude. A small number behave in ways that are not acceptable anywhere.

Games generally provide three tools: mute, block and report. Mute removes someone's chat from your session. Block goes further and usually prevents contact. Report sends the matter to the studio's moderation team. Using all three is reasonable, and none of them requires you to engage with the person first.

For serious online abuse, Australia has a national scheme. The eSafety Commissioner handles reports about seriously harmful online content and behaviour, including cyberbullying of children and adult cyber abuse, and sets out what it can act on. If something crosses from unpleasant into genuinely harmful, that is where to look rather than deciding on your own whether it is serious enough.

If a stranger asks for money, for account details, or to move the conversation to another platform in order to arrange something, that pattern is worth knowing about. Scamwatch publishes current information on approaches of that kind and takes reports.

Keeping the account healthy

Three small habits keep a game account out of trouble over the long run.

Keep the game and your operating system updated. Updates are not only about new content; the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance on why keeping software current matters. Letting a launcher update itself on a schedule that suits your connection is usually the easiest arrangement.

On a shared computer, log out at the end of a session, and do not tick the box that keeps you signed in. The cost is typing a password; the benefit is that the account stays yours.

Keep your recovery details current. An email address you no longer use is an account you can no longer recover, and people discover this at the worst possible moment.

Time, and the first-hour illusion

Free-to-play games are tuned to be generous early. Progress comes quickly, rewards arrive often, and the game feels abundant. That is a design decision aimed at the point where most people stop, and it is not dishonest, but it does mean the first hour is not representative.

Expect the pace to change. Later progress is usually slower, and that slowing is where time savers and other purchases make their case. Noticing the shift when it happens — rather than only feeling vaguely that the game has become work — puts you in a better position to decide what to do about it.

Daily log-in rewards deserve their own sentence. A reward for logging in every day is a mechanism for turning an occasional pastime into a standing appointment. If that suits you, enjoy it. If you find yourself opening a game you do not feel like playing in order not to lose a streak, the mechanism is working on you rather than for you.

A three-month review you can actually do

At the end of Step 1 you wrote down what you expected the game to cost you. At Step 4 you wrote down a spending limit. Those two notes make a review possible, and a review takes about ten minutes.

Look at three things. What you have actually spent, from the game's purchase history and your card statement. Roughly how much time you have put in, which most games or launchers will tell you. And whether you still look forward to it.

Then answer one question honestly: if this game had asked for that money up front, would you have paid it? That is not a trick question with a correct answer. Plenty of people will say yes, and that is a perfectly good outcome. The value is in asking it at all.

Stopping, pausing and closing an account

Stopping is the easy case: you simply stop. Uninstalling the client frees the disk space and does not usually delete the account, so you can return later.

Closing an account properly is a different matter and is worth checking before you need it. Vendors differ on whether an account can be deleted, how long it takes, and what happens to purchased items. The place to look is the vendor's own account settings and privacy policy, which should describe how to request deletion of your personal information.

If a vendor will not act on a reasonable request about your personal information, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains how privacy complaints work in Australia and what can be escalated to it.

The share house, at Step 5

Hypothetical example

The last appearance of the invented household. Not real people, and no results claimed for any game.

The first session runs at low picture settings, which look worse and feel steadier. Voice chat gets switched off within four minutes, not because anything went wrong but because the lounge room is a shared space and a stranger's voice coming out of the speakers is not what the other two signed up for.

Three months later the review happens over a cup of tea and takes less time than making it. The spending note and the purchase history disagree by a modest amount, which is useful information. The housemate who wanted to play still opens the game twice a week; the one who pays the internet bill has stopped noticing the downloads. Nobody concludes anything about the game in general, because that was never the question.

Before you finish

Open settings before the first match: picture low, audio sane, privacy chosen deliberately.
Find mute, block and report before you need them.
For serious online abuse, the eSafety Commissioner is the national body to approach.
Log out on shared computers and keep recovery details current.
The first hour is deliberately generous and is not representative of the rest.
A ten-minute review at three months, against notes you already made, is the whole point of writing them down.

Step 5 checklist

The last list

Open the settings menu before playing, and set picture quality low to begin with.
Set the game audio and any voice-chat volume to something comfortable.
Decide who may message you, who may send friend requests, and who can see your profile.
Decide whether voice chat is on, especially if the computer is in a shared room.
Check that your display name does not connect to accounts you would rather keep separate.
Find the mute, block and report controls and remember where they are.
Note where to report serious online abuse: the eSafety Commissioner.
Set the game and your operating system to update on a schedule that suits your connection.
Log out at the end of a session on a shared computer.
Confirm the account's recovery email address is one you still use.
Put a reminder three months out to compare your spending note against the purchase history.
Find out, before you need it, how the vendor handles account deletion.

That is the end of the course. All five checklists are gathered on the All checklists page, which is built to print onto a couple of sheets you can tick with a pen.