The short version
An online horse-riding game is a piece of software that draws a world on a screen — stables, tracks, paddocks, towns — and lets a player move a character and a horse around it. The part that matters for a household is the word online. The world is not stored on your laptop or phone. It is stored on a company's computers somewhere else, and your device is drawing a picture of it while talking to those computers over the internet.
That single fact produces almost everything else you will need to think about: the account, the password, the other people in the world, the updates that arrive without asking, the monthly cost, and the extra purchases that appear once you are inside.
This step does not ask you to decide anything. It gives you the vocabulary so that the next four steps are readable. If a term here is already familiar, skim it; nothing later depends on you memorising a list.
The words you will meet
Game companies write for people who already play. Here are the terms you are most likely to hit in the first ten minutes, in plain English.
- Client
- The program installed on your device. It draws the world and sends your inputs onward. It is not the game itself; it is the window onto it.
- Server
- The company's computer that holds the actual world and everybody's character. If it is switched off, the client shows nothing. This is why an online game can stop working even though nothing on your device changed.
- Account
- The record on the company's server that says a particular character belongs to a particular email address. The account, not the device, is what a player really owns.
- Patch or update
- A change to the client that the company pushes out, often weekly. You usually cannot refuse it and keep playing, because the client and the server have to match.
- Subscription
- A recurring payment, typically monthly, that keeps part or all of the game available. It renews by itself unless someone cancels it.
- In-game currency
- Coins, gems, stars or similar, bought with real money and spent inside the game. The conversion is set by the company and is rarely a round number, which is what makes the real cost hard to see.
- Microtransaction
- A small individual purchase inside the game — an item of clothing, a saddle, a cosmetic colour. Individually minor; the arithmetic is what surprises people.
- Randomised item
- A purchase where the buyer does not know what they will receive until after paying. Step three deals with these separately, because they raise questions the other purchases do not.
- Classification
- The rating a game carries in Australia, decided or approved under the national classification scheme and searchable at the Australian Classification Board.
What the word “online” changes
A single-player game bought on a disc is a closed thing. You own a copy, it does what it did yesterday, and nobody else is in it. An online game is closer to a shop that happens to be open: the company can change the stock, the layout and the opening hours, and other customers are walking around inside.
Four practical consequences follow, and they are worth stating one at a time.
There is an account, and it can be lost
Because the character lives on a company server, access is controlled by an email address and a password. Lose control of either and the character is gone in a way that no backup on your own device can fix. This is why step four spends as long as it does on passphrases and recovery addresses, and why the Australian Cyber Security Centre's guidance on passphrases and multi-factor authentication is relevant to a horse game at all.
There are other people
The other characters moving around are other players. Depending on the game there may be text chat, friend requests, clubs or trading. Some games restrict these features for younger accounts and some do not; the vendor's own help pages are the only reliable place to find out which. Australia's eSafety Commissioner publishes general guidance for parents on online games and the reporting routes available if something goes wrong.
The game changes under you
Updates arrive. Features are added and removed. A price or a subscription tier can change at the company's discretion, subject to the terms you agreed to and to Australian consumer law. Anything you read about a game today — on this site or anywhere else — is a description of the game on the day it was written.
The data connection is part of the cost
The client downloads its updates over your connection, and the game talks to the server continuously while someone is playing. On a fixed home connection this is usually unremarkable. On a mobile data plan, a large weekly update is not unremarkable at all. Step two returns to this.
The three ways these games take money
Almost every online game of this kind uses one of three models, or a mixture of them. Knowing which one you are looking at tells you where to look for the real cost.
| Model | How it works | Where the cost hides |
|---|---|---|
| One-off purchase | You pay once for the client and play. | Rare in online games. Watch for later expansions sold separately. |
| Subscription | A recurring charge, usually monthly or yearly, keeps the full game available. | Automatic renewal, and the gap between what the entry-level tier includes and what the subscription adds. |
| In-game purchases | Entry costs nothing or very little; items and currency are sold inside. | The currency conversion, bundles that round up, and randomised items. |
Mixtures are the norm: a subscription that also sells currency, or an entry-level account that is free of charge but limits where the character can ride. The point of naming the models is not to judge them. It is so that when you reach the vendor's pricing page in step three, you can ask the right question: which of these three am I actually signing up to, and what renews?
A note on where our product mention sits
Star Stable Online is the product this site has a paid relationship with, and it is a game of this general kind. We are not going to describe its contents, price, platforms or features anywhere in this course, because we hold no vendor statement about them and inventing the details would be worse than useless. Step three shows you how to read the vendor's own pages; the vendor's answers are the ones to trust.
Paid link: if you follow it and create an account, we are paid a commission; your cost is unchanged either way.
What this kind of game is not
Several assumptions trip up people new to the genre, so it is worth clearing them before step two.
- It is not a riding lesson. Horse games are animated worlds with stories and tasks. They teach nothing about handling a real animal, and no claim in this course suggests otherwise.
- It is not a one-off purchase in disguise. Even when there is a single up-front price, the online part implies an ongoing relationship with the company holding the account.
- It is not inherently unsafe. Nothing on this page says your device is at risk or that your household is in danger. Online games involve ordinary considerations — money, time, strangers, passwords — of the sort you already manage elsewhere.
- It is not something you must decide about today. There is no deadline attached to reading this. If the answer at the end of step two is “not yet”, that is a complete and respectable outcome of the course.
The worked household at step one
Our hypothetical household — one adult, one ten-year-old, a shared laptop, a phone, a regional town — did only one thing at this step. They read the vocabulary list out loud together and worked out that the child's question, “can I get the horse game”, was really three separate questions: can the laptop run it, is there a monthly cost, and will there be strangers in the chat.
Separating the question into three is the whole output of step one. The adult did not have an answer to any of them yet, and that is where step two starts. No product was opened, nothing was installed, and nothing was paid for.
Before you move on
- The game world sits on a company's server; your device runs a client that talks to it.
- The account — an email address and a password — is the thing that really matters.
- Other players are present, and chat and friend features vary between games.
- Money arrives through one of three models, usually mixed; the hidden part is renewal and in-game currency.
- Everything described about a specific game is true only on the day it was written.
Checklist for step one
Nothing here costs money and nothing requires an account. Tick it on paper, or print the All checklists page later.
- 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 — and I know I was not meant to.