Chapter Five.

Living with it afterwards: time, money and leaving well

Step 5 of 5

The shape of a month

The first week of a live-service game is unrepresentative. Progress is rapid, rewards arrive constantly, and almost everything is new. The second and third weeks are where you find out what the game is actually like, because the campaign slows, the upgrades get more expensive, and the shape of the routine becomes visible. A decision made in week one — about money, about time, about whether this suits you — is being made with the wrong information.

This is why the course asks you to put a review in your diary a month out rather than deciding anything in the first fortnight. A month is long enough for the novelty to wear off and short enough that nothing has become a fixture.

• Week oneFast progress, generous rewards, several new systems introduced. Take notes rather than conclusions.
• Week twoThe campaign slows. Upgrade costs rise. The first time-limited event probably appears.
• Week threeThe routine is visible. You will have noticed whether you look forward to opening it or feel you ought to.
• Week fourThe review: your notebook, your bank statement and ten honest minutes.

Daily tasks and the feeling of obligation

Nearly every game in this genre includes a list of small daily tasks with a reward for completing them, and often a streak that resets if a day is missed. The design intention is openly understood: it gives a reason to open the game each day. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends entirely on how you relate to it.

The useful distinction is between a game you open because you want to and a game you open because a counter will reset. If you find yourself logging in at eleven at night to preserve a streak, that is information. It is not a moral failing and it does not mean anything is wrong with you; it means a system designed to produce that behaviour has produced it. The ordinary response is to break the streak deliberately once and notice that nothing much happens.

Events, and the pressure of a countdown

Time-limited events are a fixture of the genre: a special set of fights, a special reward, a clock. They work on the ordinary human dislike of missing out, and they are entirely normal in this kind of game.

Two things make them manageable. The first is knowing that in a game run for years, events return; a reward that looks unrepeatable usually is not, and the characters offered in a limited event are typically available again later. The second is that a countdown is a reason to hurry only if you have accepted that the event matters. You are allowed to let an event pass entirely. Nothing that happens to a team of imaginary champions during a week in November is going to matter to you in March.

If you do decide to participate, decide the budget before you open the event screen, not inside it. The arithmetic habit from Step 3 — converting premium currency back into Australian dollars before spending it — applies with extra force when a clock is on screen.

The monthly money review

This is the part of the course that does the most work, and it takes ten minutes once a month.

1. Open your bank statement or banking app and search for the merchant name you noted in Step 3.
2. Add up every transaction in the month. Use the statement figure, not your memory and not the in-game currency balance.
3. Compare the total with the limit you wrote down, with its date, before you installed anything.
4. If the total is under the limit, write the figure in your notebook and carry on.
5. If the total is over the limit, do not adjust the limit. Write down the circumstances instead: which day, which purchase, what was on screen at the time. A pattern that is written down can be dealt with; one that is only remembered cannot.
6. Set a reminder for the same date next month.

One more arrangement worth considering: check whether your bank offers controls on your card or account, such as transaction limits or the ability to block certain categories of spending. Australian banks vary in what they provide, and your own bank's app or help pages are the place to find out what yours offers.

Clans, alliances and other people

Most games in this genre encourage you to join a group of other players — called a clan, a guild or an alliance — which opens up cooperative content and group rewards. This is usually the most genuinely sociable part of the experience and also the most common source of obligation, because a group may expect a minimum level of daily participation from its members.

Join one if you want the company. Read what it expects before you join, leave if the expectations grow beyond what you want to give, and remember that a group of strangers on the internet has no claim on your evenings. If conduct inside such a group becomes a problem — harassment, pressure, contact that is not welcome — the eSafety Commissioner is the Australian body that publishes guidance on online conduct and on the complaint avenues available.

Keeping the account safe over time

• Keep the second authentication factor switched on. An account that has had months of effort put into it is worth more to a thief than a new one.
• Never enter your game password on a site reached from a message, a chat link or a video description, however official the page looks.
• Decline offers of free currency, account boosting or trading services from other players. These are a standard shape of account theft, and Scamwatch describes the general pattern.
• Install game updates from the game's own updater, and keep your operating system current. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes free guidance on both.
• If you believe personal information held by a publisher has been mishandled, the OAIC explains how privacy complaints work in Australia.

When it stops being a hobby

A game is a hobby when it adds to the week and a problem when it starts taking from it. The signals people describe are ordinary and recognisable: spending more than was planned and not wanting to look at the total, chasing a particular result through repeated purchases, playing to relieve a bad mood rather than for enjoyment, concealing how much has been spent from the people you live with, or feeling bad after a session more often than good.

If any of that is familiar, the practical steps are small and immediate: remove the payment method from the account, tell one person the real figure, and set the review date closer than a month. If spending on chance-based rewards has become difficult to control, that is something to raise with your GP or with a free, confidential support service in your state or territory; those services exist, they are used by people in exactly this situation, and there is nothing unusual about asking. This course cannot assess anyone's situation and does not try to; it can say that the door is open and ordinary to walk through.

Leaving cleanly

Stopping is a normal outcome and deserves as much of a procedure as starting did.

1. Decide whether you are pausing or finishing. Pausing needs nothing except not opening it. Finishing is worth doing properly.
2. Remove any stored payment method from the game account first, before anything else.
3. Cancel any recurring purchase — a monthly pass or subscription — through whichever service actually charges you. It is not always the game itself; it may be an app store or a payment provider.
4. Look for an account deletion option in the game's account settings or in its privacy notice. Many publishers provide one, and most privacy notices state how to make the request if there is no button.
5. Uninstall the game through your operating system's normal remove-a-program route, and check afterwards whether a folder of leftover files remains in your user directory.
6. Check your bank statement once more, a month later, to confirm nothing is still being charged.
7. Keep the email address active for a while in case there is anything outstanding to confirm.

The example household, at the end of Step 5

The hypothetical Adelaide household reaches the four-week review. One of them has opened the game most evenings and skipped a Tuesday without noticing, which was the experiment. The other stopped after the first week and has not thought about it since. Their bank statement shows nothing, because their limit was nothing and they kept it. They set the next review for a month on, and they write one line about whether the laptop ran hot. That is the whole of what the fifth checklist asks for, and they are finished with the workbook.

Before you close the workbook

You have reached the end of a course that asked you to write things down, look things up at their source, and decide about money before anybody offered you anything. If you have done the five checklists, you now know what the genre is, whether your machine suits it, what it is classified as and what it can cost, how to create an account and install safely, and how to review and leave. If you have decided not to play anything at all, the course has worked exactly as well.

Everything in these five steps can be done without spending a dollar, and the course would say the same things if no affiliate link appeared on it. The All checklists page gathers the five checklists on a single printable sheet, and the Affiliate Disclosure explains the commercial arrangement behind the one title the course names.