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Step 1 of 5

What a free-to-play online PC game actually involves

Before anything is installed, it helps to know what the word "game" is covering here. It is not one thing. It is four separate arrangements that arrive together, and each one can be understood on its own.

The four parts you are agreeing to

When someone says they are going to play an online game on a computer, four distinct things are happening at once. There is a program that runs on the computer in front of you. There is an account held on a company's servers somewhere else. There are other human beings connected to the same match at the same time. And there is a shop, usually inside the program, selling things that exist only inside the game.

Most confusion about this hobby comes from treating those four as a single lump. They are not. You can want the first and the third and have no interest in the fourth. You can be perfectly comfortable with the program and quite uncomfortable with the account terms. Separating them is the whole purpose of this step, because every decision in the four steps that follow belongs to one of the four.

This workbook is about desktop and laptop computers — Windows, macOS and Linux. Phones, tablets and consoles are left out on purpose. They have different storage, different payment plumbing, different parental controls and different account systems, so advice written for a laptop can be wrong on a console in ways that are not obvious.

Part one: the client program

A client is the piece of software that runs on your own computer. It draws the picture, reads your keyboard and mouse, plays the sound, and talks over the internet to the company's servers. In an online game, the client is not the whole game. The authoritative version of what is happening — who moved where, who hit what — usually lives on the server, and your client is showing you its best local guess, corrected many times a second.

That split explains several things that otherwise look like faults. It explains why a game can look perfectly smooth and still feel unresponsive: the drawing is local and fast, while the confirmation is remote and slow. It explains why two people in the same match can briefly see slightly different things. And it explains why a game can be unplayable despite running beautifully on your machine, because the problem is the distance between you and the server rather than the computer.

The client is also a normal program in every ordinary sense. It occupies disk space — for a large online title, often tens of gigabytes. It updates, sometimes weekly. It can be uninstalled through the usual mechanism of your operating system, and uninstalling it does not close your account. Keeping those two facts apart saves a lot of worry later: removing the program is a local decision, closing the account is a decision you make with the company.

Part two: the account

An account is a record the company keeps about you: at minimum an identifier, an email address, a password, and whatever you have accumulated inside the game. It is what lets you sit down at a different computer and find your progress waiting. It is also the part of the arrangement that involves the most law, because it is where personal information is collected.

Three things about accounts are worth settling before you make one, and all three are covered properly in Step 3. First, the email address you use becomes the key to everything else, including password resets, so it needs to be one you will still control in five years. Second, the account carries an age rule, and that rule is the company's, set out in the terms you accept. Third, accounts are the thing that gets stolen. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general, free guidance on protecting personal accounts at cyber.gov.au, including multi-factor authentication, which is the single most useful habit in this whole workbook.

It is worth being clear about what the account is not. It is not a licence you own outright and can sell. In almost all online games, what you buy inside the game is a permission to use something within that game while the service runs, not a possession you take away. That is a general feature of the category rather than a claim about any particular title, and the terms of the specific game you choose will say how it works there.

Part three: the other people

A team-based online game puts you in a match with strangers, usually between a handful and a few dozen of them, often from other countries. They can typically communicate with you by typed chat, and sometimes by voice. This is the part of the hobby that most surprises people who expected a solitary activity.

Two practical consequences follow. The first is that the social settings matter as much as the graphics settings. Most online games let you mute individual players, turn off voice entirely, restrict or disable text chat, and limit who can send you messages or invitations. Finding those settings before your first match, rather than during an unpleasant one, is part of Step 4's checklist.

The second is that the people on the other end are not all playing. Online games attract a steady traffic of attempts to take accounts, usually by offering something valuable: free in-game currency, a rare item, a tournament invitation, a link to a site that looks like the game's own login page. Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, describes the current shapes these take at scamwatch.gov.au. The eSafety Commissioner at esafety.gov.au publishes guidance on online abuse and on games specifically, including material written for parents and carers.

None of this means the environment is hostile. It means the social layer has settings, and settings have defaults, and defaults are chosen by someone other than you.

Part four: the shop

Nearly every free-to-play online game contains a shop. What it sells falls into a few recognisable kinds. There is premium currency, bought with real money and spent inside the game, which exists partly so that prices stop being legible in dollars. There are cosmetic items, which change how something looks and nothing else. There are convenience purchases, which speed up progress you could otherwise reach by playing. There are subscriptions or passes, which give a bundle of benefits for a period. And there are randomised items, where you pay a fixed amount for an unknown result drawn from a pool.

That last category deserves its own treatment and gets it in Step 5. For now, the point of listing them is that "the shop" is not one offer. A household rule like "no randomised purchases, cosmetics are fine up to twenty dollars a month" is only possible once the kinds are separated.

Purchases made in Australia are consumer transactions, and the consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law apply to digital products and services sold here. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explains those guarantees at accc.gov.au. Reading that page once, before you spend anything, is a better use of fifteen minutes than almost anything else in this step.

What "free to play" means, and what it does not

"Free to play" is a description of the entry price. It means the client can be installed and the game entered without payment. It does not mean no money is involved, and it does not mean the game is a charity: the costs are carried by the fraction of players who buy things in the shop.

This is worth stating plainly because the phrase invites two opposite mistakes. One is assuming a hidden charge will appear — generally it will not, and you can play many of these titles indefinitely without entering a payment method. The other is assuming that free entry means free of consequence, when the design of the shop is a real part of the product and is covered in Step 5.

World of Tanks, the title named elsewhere on this site, is one example of a game in this category. The arrangement between the publisher of Lucid Margin and that title is an affiliate one: a commission is paid when a reader creates and activates an account after following a marked link. Prices, availability and what the shop contains are the vendor's to state, not ours, and we do not restate them here. Visit the World of Tanks website to read those details from the source.Paid affiliate link. The publisher is paid a commission if you create and activate an account after following it. Nothing in this step changes because of that arrangement.

Classification, and what it tells you

Computer games sold or made available in Australia are subject to the national classification scheme. The Australian Classification Board maintains a searchable database of classified titles, with the classification and the consumer advice that goes with it, at classification.gov.au. Looking up a title there takes under a minute and tells you the official rating and the reason for it, rather than a store's own description.

Two cautions. A classification describes content; it does not describe how much money the shop invites you to spend, and it is not a judgement about whether a particular person will enjoy the game. And classifications and consumer advice can change when a title is reclassified, so the database, not a page like this one, is the current answer. Nothing in this workbook presents games containing purchasable randomised items as suitable for children; where young people are involved, Step 3 and Step 5 both say what to look at.

Starting with a free-to-play title: both sides

The words used from here on