How to use these
These are the five checklists that close the five steps, gathered so you can work through them away from a screen. The print button below produces a clean black-and-white version: the site menu, the decoration and the links disappear, the boxes stay, and the whole thing fits on ordinary paper.
The boxes are printed squares, not controls. Nothing on this site records a tick, remembers where you stopped or knows that you were here — there is no account, no cookie and no stored progress, which is set out in full in our Cookie Policy. If you want the list to remember anything, the pen is doing that job.
Three suggestions from the way the course is built. First, do them in order. Checklist three assumes the sentence you wrote in checklist two, and checklist four assumes the decisions in three; out of order, several items will not have anything to refer to. Second, do not try to finish them in one evening. The natural rhythm is one checklist per sitting, with a gap, because two of them ask you to have a conversation with somebody else in the household rather than to look something up.
Third, treat an unticked box as information rather than as a failure. An item you cannot complete usually means a question that has not been answered yet — which device, whose email address, what the monthly figure is. That is the item doing its job. Several households will reach the end of checklist two and decide that the answer, for now, is no. That is a legitimate result of the course and it costs nothing.
Finally, keep the printed sheet. The step-five review asks you to re-read what you decided every six months, and a sheet of paper with your own handwriting on it is a better record than a memory of having thought about it once. If you are coming to these cold, the step pages explain every item: each heading below links back to the step it came from.
Checklist one — understanding what these games are
- I can say, in my own words, what a client and a server are.
- I know that the account, not the device, holds the character.
- I have written down the three questions hiding inside “can I have this game” for my own household.
- I know which of the three payment models I will be looking for on a pricing page.
- I understand that other players may be present and that chat rules differ between games.
- I have not installed, bought or signed up for anything at this step.
Checklist two — what your household needs
- I have named the player and, separately, the account holder.
- I have chosen which email address the account will use, and who holds its recovery details.
- I have identified the device, noted whether it is shared, and checked that it has free storage space.
- I know whether updates will download on a fixed connection or a metered one.
- I have written down the weekly time pattern and said it out loud to everyone involved.
- I have set a monthly figure in Australian dollars, and a standing answer for purchase requests.
- I have decided our position on chat and friend requests.
- I have written the whole thing as one sentence and can read it back.
Checklist three — price, classification and the extras
- I opened the vendor's own site, not an advertisement or a video description.
- I have every tier written down with its figure and billing period.
- I know whether the figures are in Australian dollars or another currency.
- I have read and noted the cancellation paragraph.
- I know whether there is a shop inside the game.
- I have searched the Australian Classification Board database for the title and recorded what I found.
- I have worked out what one unit of any in-game currency costs in AUD.
- Our household position on randomised items is decided and written down.
- I have compared the notepad against my step-two sentence and acted on anything that failed it.
Checklist four — the account and the first session
- The account email address exists, is not a work address, and I can read mail at it.
- The passphrase is unique to this account and is written down where it can be found again.
- I created the account from the vendor's own site, not from an advertisement.
- I read the consent boxes and left marketing consent unticked unless I wanted it.
- Two-factor authentication is on, or I have noted that the vendor does not offer it.
- Recovery codes, if any, are stored with the passphrase.
- Privacy, chat and friend-request settings match our step-two position.
- I have decided whether a payment method is stored, and written the decision down.
- Device and platform controls have been looked at, using their own help pages.
- In the first session we found the settings, the block and report buttons, and the shop.
- We agreed what counts as the end of a session.
Checklist five — time, spending and account safety
- I have reviewed the time pattern against what actually happens and adjusted it if needed.
- A monthly reminder exists somewhere I will see it.
- I know what the game's charges look like on a statement.
- Any subscription has been confirmed as still wanted this month.
- Everyone in the household knows the one sentence about not typing account details anywhere but the vendor's site.
- We know where to report a problem: the vendor, eSafety, Scamwatch.
- The recovery plan is written down: mailbox first, then the vendor's recovery process.
- The display name contains nothing that identifies the player in the real world.
- After the last large update, I checked that the privacy and chat settings survived it.
- A six-monthly date is set to re-read the step-two sentence.