Working out what your household needs

Why this comes before any shopping

Most households meet an online game in the opposite order: a child asks, an adult opens the game's website, and the decision gets made on a page designed to make a particular answer easy. That is not a trap anyone set for you — every company's own site is built to present its own product well. It is simply the wrong place to work out what you need.

So this step happens away from any product. At the end of it you will have six answers, written down. In step three you will take those answers to a vendor's page and compare, rather than being introduced to a set of options and choosing among them.

None of these questions has a right answer. They have your answer, and the point is only that it exists before money or an account does.

Who is playing, and whose account is it

Start with the person. An adult playing alone has one set of considerations. A child playing with an adult nearby has another. A teenager playing independently has a third, and the honest version of that third case usually includes the fact that the adult will not be watching most of the sessions.

Then separate the player from the account holder. These are often the same person and often should not be. The account is the email address and password that control access; whoever holds the recovery email can get the account back if it is lost or taken. A common arrangement in households with younger children is that the adult's email address is the recovery address, while the child plays. Another is a dedicated email address created for the purpose, with both people knowing the passphrase.

Write down three things: who plays, which email address the account is attached to, and who knows the passphrase. Step four turns this into a procedure; step two only needs the decision.

Age, and why the course does not quote one

You will see age guidance in many places. We do not state an age at which any particular game becomes suitable, because the suitability of a specific title is a classification question and a household question, not something a general course can answer. For the classification question, Australia has a public database of decisions at the Australian Classification Board, and step three walks through searching it. For the household question, the eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on online games and younger players.

The device question

Which machine will this actually run on? Not which one you would like to use — which one will be in the room when someone wants to play.

Three practical points, kept general because specific requirements belong to specific games:

• Check the vendor's stated requirements, not a forum post. Every game of this kind publishes minimum requirements somewhere on its own site. That is the only statement that binds the vendor.
• Note whether the device is shared. A laptop that is also the household's tax-and-banking machine is a different proposition from an old laptop used for homework. Shared devices mean shared browser sessions, shared saved cards and shared logins, and they make the step-four account hygiene matter more.
• Note the free storage space. Online games update often and grow over time. A device with a nearly full drive will become the problem three months in, not on day one.

If the honest answer is “we do not have a device that will run it”, that is an answer, and it is better reached now than after a purchase.

The connection question

Online play needs a steady connection for as long as someone is playing, and periodic large downloads for updates. Two things are worth checking before anything is installed.

First, whether your internet service has a data allowance, and how close to it you normally run. Games of this kind are not usually the biggest consumer in a household — video streaming generally is — but update downloads arrive in large pieces without warning.

Second, whether the play will happen on a mobile connection. Tethering a laptop to a phone, or playing on a tablet using mobile data, turns every update into a metered download. If that is your situation, decide in advance that updates happen on a fixed connection.

The time question

Decide what a normal week looks like before the game is in the house, because afterwards you will be negotiating rather than deciding. Three patterns that households commonly use, none of them better than another:

1. Fixed days. Play happens on certain days, for whatever length suits those days. Easy to remember; occasionally rigid.
2. A weekly budget of hours. A total for the week, spent as the player chooses. Teaches planning; needs someone to keep count.
3. Session-shaped. Play runs until a natural stopping point — the end of a task or a story chapter. Gentler to stop, harder to predict, and worth agreeing an upper bound.

Whatever you choose, write it down and say it out loud to everyone involved. A rule that lives only in one adult's head is not a rule yet.

The budget question

Set a figure in Australian dollars, per month, that your household is prepared to spend on this — including nothing, which is a perfectly ordinary figure to set. Then decide two more things while it is still hypothetical:

• What happens when the player asks for an in-game purchase. Who decides, when, and is there a standing answer like “we look at it on the first of the month”?
• Whether a card will be stored anywhere the player can reach it. A saved card on a shared device, combined with an in-game shop, removes the pause between wanting and buying.

We say nothing here about what any particular game costs. Prices change, differ by platform and are the vendor's to state. Step three is about reading a price page properly; step two is about knowing your own number before you read one.

The social question

Decide what you want from the social side, then check in step three whether a given game offers it. The common positions:

Whichever you pick, learn where the block and report buttons are. The eSafety Commissioner accepts reports about serious online abuse in Australia and explains what it can act on, and in-game reporting tools go to the company that runs the world.

Writing the one-sentence answer

Six answers compress into one sentence. It looks like this, with your own values in place of the example's:

“One player, aged ten, on the family laptop with the adult's email as the account recovery address, three afternoons a week, up to thirty dollars a month decided on the first Sunday, with chat limited to people we know.”

That sentence is the tool you take into step three. When a pricing page offers a choice, you are not asking “which of these looks good” — you are asking “which of these fits the sentence, and does any of it fail the sentence outright?” A game that cannot meet the sentence is simply not the game for this household, with no further argument required.

The worked household at step two

The hypothetical household from step one sat down for twenty minutes. The laptop was the only candidate device and was also used for the adult's work, which settled the shared-device question. The connection was fixed, with a generous allowance, so updates were not a concern, but tethering during holidays at a relative's house was noted as a future one.

They set three afternoons a week, and a monthly figure the adult was comfortable with even if it were spent every month. The account would use a new email address created for the purpose, with the adult holding the recovery details. On chat, they chose the middle position: friends only, with a rule that any request from someone not known from school gets shown to the adult first.

They did not open a game's website at all during this step, and they did not decide yet whether any game would be purchased.

Checklist for step two

• 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.