All checklists

Every checklist from the five steps, gathered here and formatted for paper. The navigation, the contents lists and this button disappear when the page is printed.

Print these checklists

How to use them

These lists are deliberately dumb. They do not remember which boxes you have ticked, because this site stores nothing in your browser — no cookies, no saved progress, nothing that would let a second visit know about the first. The boxes are printed squares. Tick them with a pen.

That is not a limitation worked around; it is the design. A checklist you fill in on paper sits next to the computer while you are reading a requirements table or a privacy notice, which is exactly where it is useful, and it does not vanish when a browser tab is closed. It also means nothing about what you are considering, what you own or how far you have read exists anywhere outside your own house.

The intended order is the order of the course, because each list assumes the one before it has been done. The before-you-start list is the exception: it is worth running through once even if you read nothing else, since every item on it is a decision made more cheaply now than later. The Step 2 list produces a written record of your computer's specifications that you will use again whenever you look at any game, not only the one that prompted this. Keep that sheet.

Not every item will apply to you. A household with nobody under 18 can skip the parental control items; a reader with an unmetered connection can skip the data allowance items; someone who has decided to spend nothing can still read the Step 5 list, because most of it is about time rather than money. Striking out an item deliberately is a better outcome than leaving it unread, because you will remember having decided.

There is no finish line and nothing to submit. Nobody is counting these, there is no certificate, and no page here will ask you for an email address to send you anything. If a list raises a question the course does not answer, the About page explains what this workbook relies on and where it stops, and the Contact page is a plain email address.

One honest note about the lists themselves: they describe a general method, not a particular product. Where a step needs a specific figure — a system requirement, an age rule, a price — the checklist sends you to the vendor or to an Australian government body rather than giving you a number, because numbers on a page like this one go stale quietly and a reader has no way of telling when they did.