A five-step course in starting your first PC game, written for adults in Australia
Each step takes about eight to ten minutes to read, and the whole course runs to roughly an hour if you read it in one sitting. Nothing expires, nothing is marked, and you can stop after any step and still be better off than when you started.
How this course is paid for. Some of the links on this site go to Enlisted, a game we use as a worked example. Those are paid affiliate links: if you sign up through one, the publisher of this site is paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link. You pay nothing extra, and the commission plays no part in deciding what the steps say or which products are named.
You can finish all five steps, and every checklist in them, without clicking an affiliate link and without spending a cent. Read the full disclosure.
The five steps, in order
- What a PC game account actually is — the three separate things people call "the game", and what you agree to when you register.
- Working out whether your computer can run it — reading your own specifications, and reading a vendor's stated requirements against them.
- Classification, terms and your consumer rights — the Australian rating, the licence you accept, and what the law here guarantees you.
- Registering and confirming your email address safely — passphrases, two-factor sign-in, and telling a real confirmation message from a fake one.
- Your first session, and deciding about spending — settings, other players, in-game currency, and how to set a limit before you need one.
Who this course is for, and who it is not for
This course is written for an adult in Australia who has decided to try a PC game for the first time, or who is helping somebody else do that — a parent setting up a computer for a teenager, an adult child setting one up for a parent, a person who has only ever played on a phone and wants to understand what changes on a desktop machine.
It assumes you know how to open a web browser and install an application, and nothing beyond that. Every term is explained the first time it appears. If you already know what a launcher is, what two-factor authentication does and how to read a minimum specification, you will find Steps 1 and 2 slow, and you may prefer to start at Step 3.
It is not for you if you want reviews, scores or a ranking of which games are worth playing. We do not score games and we do not compare them. It is also not a troubleshooting service: when something specific breaks on your machine, the vendor's own support channel is the right place, and this course will point you there rather than guess.
What you will be able to do after each step
After Step 1 you will be able to say, out loud and correctly, what you are signing up for when a game asks for an email address — and what it is not asking for. After Step 2 you will be able to find your computer's processor, memory, graphics hardware, operating system and free storage, and hold them next to a published requirements list without guessing.
After Step 3 you will be able to look up an Australian classification, skim a licence agreement for the four clauses that matter, and know which promises a seller cannot take away from you under Australian law. After Step 4 you will have an account protected by a long passphrase and a second factor, and a working habit for checking whether a confirmation email is genuine.
After Step 5 you will have played a first session with settings you chose deliberately, you will know how to mute, block and report another player, and you will have written down a spending limit in Australian dollars before any purchase screen asks you for one.
The one checklist to do before anything else
If you only do one thing today, do this one. It takes about fifteen minutes and it is the part people most often skip.
Before you register for anything
- Write down which computer you will play on, and whether it runs Windows, macOS or Linux.
- Check that it is a desktop or laptop computer. The example used in this course is published for desktop operating systems, not for phones, tablets or consoles.
- Find out how much free storage space that computer has right now.
- Decide which email address the account will use, and confirm you can actually open that mailbox.
- Decide, before you look at any store page, the maximum amount in Australian dollars you are willing to spend in the first month. Writing "nothing" is a perfectly good answer.
- If the player is under 18, agree with them now who checks the classification and who holds the payment details.
A worked example we follow through all five steps
To keep the advice concrete, the course follows one hypothetical household — an invented illustration, not a real family and not anybody's account of their own experience. The household has two adults and a fourteen-year-old. There is one four-year-old laptop running Windows, one older desktop running Linux, and a shared internet connection on a plan with a monthly data allowance.
At each step we show what that household would actually do: which machine they check first, what they find when they look up a classification, which email address they use for the account, and how they settle on a figure for spending. Because it is a constructed example, nothing in it reports a result from any product, and you should not read it as one.
What you can do for free
Everything this course asks you to do costs nothing: checking your hardware, reading a classification entry, reading a licence, setting up a passphrase manager, turning on two-factor sign-in, and reading the Australian government guidance we link to. The checklists are on this site in full and are printable.
Whether any particular game costs money is a separate question, and one only the vendor can answer. We do not quote prices for Enlisted or for anything else, because prices and offers change and a figure printed here would be wrong sooner or later. Check the vendor's own site on the day you are deciding.
Where Enlisted appears in this course, and why
Enlisted is named in this course as a worked example of a sign-up flow: it is a game set in the atmosphere of the Second World War, and getting started with it involves registering, confirming your email address and then logging in to play. That three-part pattern is the one Step 1 and Step 4 teach, so having a real title to point at makes the abstract part easier to follow.
It is named because the pattern fits, and it is also the product the publisher of this site earns a commission on. Both of those things are true at once, and you are entitled to know it, which is why it is in the box at the top of this page, beside every link, and on its own page. We are not Enlisted's publisher, partner or authorised source, and nothing here is approved by them. If you removed every Enlisted link from this site, all five steps and all five checklists would still work exactly as written.
If you want to look at the example for yourself before starting, you can visit the Enlisted website and come back. It is not a required part of any step.
The link above is a paid affiliate link: a commission is paid to IGOA s.r.o. if you register through it, at no extra cost to you.
Official Australian help
Where a step touches something a government body publishes guidance on, we link to that body rather than paraphrasing it. The Australian Classification Board publishes the classification and consumer advice for games made available here. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes plain-language guidance on passphrases and account protection. Scamwatch collects and publishes information about scams. The eSafety Commissioner handles online safety, including reporting serious online abuse. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner oversees privacy. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission administers the Australian Consumer Law.
How this course is written and kept current
The course is written by the editorial team at IGOA s.r.o. There are no named authors, because no single person's opinion is the point: the steps describe procedures that apply across the category, not one person's preferences. Each step is reviewed at least twice a year, and sooner if an Australian regulator changes its published guidance or a link in a step stops working. The review date sits in the footer of every page.
Details that belong to a vendor — system requirements, prices, what an account does — are not restated here as fact, because they change without notice. Where you need one of those, the course tells you to go and read it at the source. How the course was put together is set out in full on the About page.