Step 5 — Staying in control: spending, randomised items and time

Writing a spending rule that holds

In Step 1 you wrote down a maximum for the year in Australian dollars. Turn it now into a rule with three parts: an amount, a period, and a method.

An example of the shape, not a recommendation: "Up to fifty dollars a year, reviewed each December, paid by prepaid card with nothing stored on the account." Yours might be a different amount, including zero. What matters is that all three parts exist, because a rule with only an amount collapses the first time something is on sale.

The method is the part people skip and the part that does the most work. Stored card details turn a purchase into one click; removing them turns it into a deliberate act that takes a minute, and a surprising number of purchases do not survive that minute. A prepaid or separate low-balance card adds a hard ceiling that does not depend on you remembering anything.

Write the rule where you will see it — on paper near the computer is better than in a note nobody opens. Review it on a date rather than when you feel like it.

How money actually leaves your account

Most games put at least one layer between your money and the thing you buy. You buy a quantity of in-game currency with dollars, then buy items with the currency. Three consequences follow, and all three are worth knowing before the first purchase rather than after the tenth.

• The arithmetic gets harder on purpose. An item priced at 740 units of something is not a dollar figure you can read at a glance, and that is a design choice rather than a translation problem.
• Remainders push the next purchase. If bundles come in sizes that never quite match item prices, you are usually left holding a balance too small to use and large enough to feel wasteful.
• Currency rarely converts back. Dollars become currency; currency does not generally become dollars again.

Two habits counter all of this. Convert every price back to Australian dollars before deciding — divide what the bundle cost by what it contained, and multiply. And check your card or account statement monthly rather than relying on memory, because small amounts are exactly the ones memory loses.

If a game's prices are shown in a foreign currency, add your card's international transaction fee to the figure before comparing. That fee is charged by your bank, not the game, and it is stated in your account's terms.

Randomised items, in plain words

A randomised in-game item — a crate, case or box — is a purchase where you pay a known amount and receive an item drawn from a pool. You know the pool; you do not know which item you will get. Some games publish the chances of each outcome; some do not.

Three things follow, stated without drama.

1. The cost of a particular item is not the price of one crate. If you want a specific thing, the amount you will spend before you get it is unknown in advance, and can be far more than the sticker price suggests.
2. Near-misses are not progress. Receiving something close to what you wanted does not move you closer to it. Each opening is independent unless the game explicitly says otherwise.
3. If published chances exist, read them. Where a publisher states the probability of each outcome, that is the one piece of hard information available, and it is usually in a help page rather than on the purchase screen.

This is also the part of the category that attracts the most public and regulatory attention, and the arrangements differ between countries and change over time. If you want to know the current position in Australia, read the regulators and the Classification Board directly rather than relying on a summary written at some unknown date — including this one.

Classification in Australia

Computer games sold in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme, and the Australian Classification Board publishes its decisions and the consumer advice that goes with them. That consumer advice — short phrases describing the content that led to the classification — is often more useful to a household than the classification letter itself.

Two practical notes. The classification applies to the game's content as classified; it is not a statement about a game's store, its purchases, or who you will meet in it online. And the database on the Board's site is the authoritative source for a particular title. We do not reproduce ratings or age thresholds here, because they are specific to each title and change; look up the title you are considering.

For anything concerning behaviour between players rather than content — harassment, abuse, unwanted contact — the relevant Australian body is the eSafety Commissioner, which is the national independent regulator for online safety and has a complaints function.

The household conversation

If more than one person uses the computer, four questions settle most of what would otherwise become an argument later. Have them once, early, when nothing has gone wrong.

• Whose account is it? Step 3 showed why this matters: many agreements prohibit sharing, so "one account for the house" may be an arrangement the terms do not allow.
• Is a payment method stored, and whose? The default answer of "none" is easy to change later and hard to undo once a pattern exists.
• Who gets told before a purchase? A rule that purchases are mentioned, not hidden, costs nothing when everyone agrees to it in advance.
• What is the stopping time on a school night? Agreed in daylight, this is a rule; agreed at midnight, it is a fight.

Operating systems and some games offer parental or family controls, including spending limits and time limits. They are worth setting up, and they are a support for an agreement rather than a replacement for one.

Time, sleep and the habit of stopping

Online games are built to be easy to continue and awkward to leave: a match ends and the next one is already forming, a daily reward resets at a particular hour, a season has a deadline. None of that is sinister, and all of it works.

The countermeasure is the same shape as the spending rule — decided in advance, external to the moment. A few arrangements that people find workable:

• Set an alarm in another room for the time you intend to stop, so stopping requires standing up.
• Decide the stopping point by event rather than clock — "after this match" — and then actually stop at it.
• Treat a daily reward as something you can miss. Missing one is the cheapest way to discover how much it was actually worth to you.
• Keep one night a week clear of it, which tells you more about the habit than any amount of introspection.

If someone's gaming is causing real harm to work, study, sleep, money or relationships, that is a health matter and a general-information website is the wrong source. Speak to a general practitioner or another qualified professional.

If something goes wrong

Four situations, four places to go. In each case, start with the publisher's own support through its official site, and keep a record of what you sent and when.

If your account is taken over, change the password on the email account first and then on the game account, because an attacker holding the email can undo everything else. Then contact the publisher's support.

Leaving, pausing and deleting

Stopping is a normal outcome and deserves as much planning as starting. Three different things are often confused.

Uninstalling removes the game from your computer and frees the disk space. The account and everything on it remain.

Pausing is simply not playing. Check the terms for what happens to a dormant account; some services reclaim names or close accounts after a long inactive period.

Deleting the account is usually permanent and usually forfeits anything bought. If you want a record of what the account held, take it before you ask, not after.

Before deleting, remove any stored payment method and cancel any subscription separately. Cancelling a subscription and deleting an account are not the same action, and doing them in the wrong order occasionally leaves a renewal running.

The worked example, concluded

The invented Melbourne household finishes with four decisions written on one page stuck to the side of the monitor. No payment method is stored on the account. Any spending comes from a prepaid card topped up deliberately, with a ceiling for the year. Purchases are mentioned to the others rather than hidden. On school nights the computer goes off at an agreed hour.

They look up the title in the Classification Board's database and read the consumer advice rather than only the letter. They find the report and block functions in the game's settings and show everyone in the house where they are.

Nothing in that list is dramatic, and none of it required anyone to decide in advance whether the game was any good. That is the point of a workbook: the decisions are made once, in daylight, by people who are not in the middle of playing.

Before you close the workbook

You have read the course. If you worked through the checklists as you went, you now have six lines about your computer, four facts about one game, five answers from its terms, a working installation with deliberate settings, and a spending rule with three parts.

All of it keeps. The next game you look at takes about twenty minutes instead of an evening, because the only part you repeat is the part specific to that game. The all-checklists page gathers every list on one printable page for exactly that reason.