Step 5 of 5

Your first session, and deciding about spending

The first session is where the earlier steps pay off. There are six or seven settings worth changing before you play rather than after, and one decision — about money — that is far easier to make now than in front of a purchase screen.

The settings worth changing before you play

Almost every game puts its options behind a settings or preferences menu, grouped in roughly the same categories. You do not need to understand all of them. These are the ones that change a first session most.

Resolution and detail level. If Step 2 showed your machine sitting near the minimum requirements, reduce the detail level before you start rather than concluding the game runs badly. Most games include a preset such as low, medium or high; starting one notch lower than you expect and raising it later is less frustrating than the reverse.

Frame rate display. Many games can show how many images per second they are drawing. Turning it on for the first session gives you a number to reason about instead of an impression.

Audio. Set the master volume before you start, and look for separate sliders for music, effects and voice chat. Voice chat at full volume with strangers is an unpleasant surprise.

Controls. Check whether mouse sensitivity and key bindings can be changed, and whether there is an option to invert the vertical axis. People have strong preferences here, and discovering yours mid-match is distracting.

Privacy and social settings. Look for who can send you messages, who can see your profile and whether you appear in search. Narrow these before you play. They are easier to loosen later than to tighten after a bad week.

Notifications. Decide whether the game may send you email or desktop notifications. This is also the setting that quietly determines how much marketing arrives.

Comfort, accessibility and stopping

A first session should be short. An hour is plenty, and ending while you are still enjoying it is a better habit than ending because you are tired.

Set the screen at a comfortable distance with the top of it near eye level, and put a glass of water next to you. If the room is dark, put a lamp on behind the screen rather than staring at a bright rectangle in the dark. These are dull recommendations that make a measurable difference to how your eyes feel afterwards.

Many games now include accessibility options: subtitle size, colour-blind modes, reduced motion, remappable controls, toggle options instead of hold-to-act. If any of those would help you or the person you are setting this up for, look for them in the settings before deciding the game is not for you. They are frequently present and rarely advertised.

Decide in advance when you will stop, and set a timer if that helps. This is advice for adults as much as for teenagers. The point is not that games are dangerous; it is that a decision made in advance is a better decision than one made at eleven at night.

Other people: chat, muting, blocking, reporting

An online game means playing with people you have not met. Most of them are unremarkable. A small number are not, and knowing in advance where the controls are means you deal with it in five seconds rather than putting up with it for an hour.

Before your first match, find three things in the interface: how to mute a player, how to block one, and how to report one. They are usually on the player list or in a menu attached to a player's name. Finding them while calm is the whole trick.

Voice chat is worth a deliberate decision rather than a default. Many players keep it off entirely and lose nothing. If a minor is playing, keeping voice chat off with strangers while allowing it with known friends is a common and reasonable household rule.

For serious online abuse, Australia has a dedicated body. The eSafety Commissioner handles online safety, including reporting pathways for serious cyberbullying of a child and for image-based abuse, and publishes guidance for parents and young people at esafety.gov.au. Reporting inside the game and reporting to eSafety are different things and you can do both.

Deciding about spending, in Australian dollars

Many online games sell something: an in-game currency, cosmetic items, passes, upgrades. The mechanics vary, the psychology does not, and the way to stay in control of it is to make the decision before you are asked.

Write down a figure in Australian dollars for the first month, before you install anything. Zero is a perfectly good figure and the one we would suggest for a first month, for the straightforward reason that you cannot yet know whether you will still be playing in four weeks.

Understand the in-game currency if there is one. Currencies are usually sold in bundles that do not divide neatly into item prices, which leaves an unspendable remainder and a gentle push toward the next bundle. Convert back to dollars before each purchase and the decision becomes a normal one.

Keep payment details out of the account where you can, and pay deliberately each time. Stored cards and one-click purchasing exist to remove the pause, and the pause is the useful part. If a minor plays on the machine, device-level or storefront-level purchase controls and a password on payment are worth setting up.

If a game includes randomised purchases, treat the money as spent the moment you press the button, because it is. Step 3 covers where to check the classification and consumer advice for this, and what a household rule about it can look like.

We do not state any price for Enlisted. The material we have from the vendor says only that it is a game set in the atmosphere of the Second World War and that getting started involves registration, confirming an email address and logging in; it says nothing about cost, so neither do we. If you want to know, the vendor's own site is the place — you can visit the Enlisted website and read it there.

Paid affiliate link: IGOA s.r.o. receives a commission for registrations made through it. Nothing you pay changes, and this step would read the same without the link.

Paying, and not paying: the honest trade-offs

Neither column is the right answer for everyone. The point of writing them next to each other is that the choice is a real one with costs on both sides, rather than a default you drift into on a Friday night.

Keeping the account healthy over time

Three small habits keep a game account in good order after the first week.

Let the client update itself, and install operating system updates when they are offered. Updates are how both the game and your computer stay secure, and postponing them indefinitely is the most common unforced error in home computing.

Review the account's security page every few months: that the email address is still one you can open, that two-factor sign-in is still on, that the recovery codes are still where you put them, and that no sign-in sessions are listed that you do not recognise.

Keep the paper from Step 2. When you next consider a game, or when you upgrade a machine, those five facts are the first thing you will want and the last thing you will remember where you put.

If you stop playing, close the account properly rather than abandoning it. Dormant accounts with reused passwords are exactly the ones that get taken over, and the vendor's support page will say how to request deletion.

The worked example: the first Saturday

Our hypothetical household — an invented illustration throughout this course — installs the client on the Windows laptop on a Saturday morning, when the download will not compete with anything else on the connection.

Before the first match they lower the detail preset one notch, turn the frame rate display on, set voice chat off with strangers and on with friends, and narrow the profile visibility settings. Together that takes about six minutes. An adult finds the mute, block and report controls and shows the fourteen-year-old where they are.

The spending figure they wrote down in Step 1 was zero for the first month, and they do not revisit it on the day. The payment details stay off the account, and the storefront's purchase password stays on.

They play for an hour and stop. The frame rate number tells them the laptop is comfortable at the lower preset, which answers a question they would otherwise have argued about. Nothing dramatic happens, which is what a well-prepared first session looks like.