Step 2 of 5

Working out what your household actually needs

This step produces a page of notes about your own house, not about any game. Doing it first means that when you reach a vendor's website you are checking it against something, instead of being shown things and reacting.

Why this comes before choosing a game

Game websites are designed to be persuasive, which is reasonable — they are selling something. The difficulty is that they present features in an order that suits them, and if you arrive without your own list you will tend to adopt theirs.

Everything in this step can be answered without opening a single game site. It should take fifteen to twenty minutes with a pen. The output is a short page of notes that Step 3 and Step 4 both consume directly, so it is not busywork.

There is also a quieter benefit. If more than one adult is involved, writing the answers down surfaces disagreements now, at the kitchen table, rather than three weeks later over a bank statement.

Question one: who is playing

Write down each person who will play and their age. If it is a child, the age matters for three separate reasons, and it is worth separating them because they get confused with one another.

The first is content: whether the material in the game is suitable, which is what the Australian classification markings speak to. The second is account rules: vendors set their own minimum ages in their terms of service, and these are not the same as classification. The third is what controls are available to you, which depends on the device and the game rather than on the law.

We do not state any age threshold here as fact, because thresholds differ by vendor and by platform and change over time. Check the vendor's terms of service for the account age rule, and the Australian Classification Board for what a given classification covers.

Note also whether more than one person will share the account. Sharing is common in families and is also the most frequent cause of an account being locked, because vendors treat an unfamiliar login as a possible intrusion.

Question two: which device, and who owns it

The device decides more than people expect. It determines which store takes the payment, which parental controls are available, how storage and updates behave, and sometimes whether a particular game is available at all.

What changes depending on the device, in general terms

Device	Who usually takes the payment	Where the controls live
Phone or tablet	The app store account on the device	Mostly in the operating system's family settings, plus whatever the game adds
Desktop or laptop	Often the vendor's own website, by card or a payment service	Mostly in the game account settings, plus any controls on the computer itself
A shared family computer	Whichever payment details are saved in the browser or account in use	Depends entirely on whether separate user profiles exist

Ownership matters as much as type. A tablet that belongs to a child and lives in a bedroom is a different proposition from the same tablet used in the lounge room, and the difference is not technical. Write down where the device physically is when it is used.

If the device is supplied by a school, check what the school permits before installing anything. That is a conversation with the school, not with the vendor.

Question three: what the connection can carry

Online games need a connection that is continuous rather than fast. A video stream can buffer ahead; a game cannot, because it does not know what happens next. This is why a connection that plays video perfectly can still be frustrating for a game.

Two things are worth noting. The first is whether the household is on a fixed connection or a mobile one, because mobile data allowances are consumed by game updates, which can be large and arrive without warning. The second is whether the connection is shared at the times the game would be played — a household where several people stream in the evening is a different environment from one where it is quiet.

You do not need to measure anything. Write down the kind of connection, whether it has a data cap, and the hours when it is busy. Step 4 revisits this when the game is actually installed.

Question four: when, and for how long

Decide the time rule before the game exists, because afterwards it becomes a negotiation about something concrete and that is harder.

A rule that works tends to have three parts: which days, how long on each, and what it is relative to — homework, dinner, bedtime. Vague rules such as "not too much" fail, not because anybody is unreasonable, but because they give nothing to point at.

Two practical notes. Online games are often harder to leave mid-session than other software, because other people are waiting or because a timed activity is running; a warning five minutes before the end costs nothing and removes most of the friction. And the device's own screen-time tools are usually a better place to enforce a limit than the game's, because they survive the game being reinstalled.

Question five: the number in dollars

Write down the most you are willing to spend in a month, in Australian dollars, and write it before you know what anything costs. The number is a decision about your household, not a reaction to a price list.

Then decide two things about it. Does the number include only recurring charges, or does it also cover in-game purchases? And who is allowed to spend against it — one adult, both, or the player with permission each time?

Be aware that prices on game sites are frequently shown in US dollars or euros, and your bank or card issuer applies its own conversion and may add a fee. If a charge looks slightly wrong on your statement, currency conversion is the usual explanation. Step 3 shows how to check what currency you are actually agreeing to.

Question six: who they will be playing with

Ask whether the point of this game is to play with specific people already known offline — school friends, cousins — or to play alongside strangers. Both are ordinary; they simply call for different settings.

If the answer is "with friends from school", then the chat settings you want are the ones that allow a short, known list and nothing else. If the answer is "with whoever is there", then the question becomes what reporting and blocking tools exist and whether you know how to use them. Either way, write the answer down now; it becomes a specific thing to look for in Step 4.

Turning the answers into a shortlist

With those six answers written, a shortlist of candidate games becomes a filtering exercise rather than a browsing one. For each game you are considering, you are now asking: does it run on our device, does its money shape fit our number, does its classification fit the player's age, and can its social features be set the way we decided?

Star Stable Online is one of the games an Australian household might put on such a shortlist, and it is the one game this course names. We name it because we hold a paid affiliate arrangement with the network behind its referral links, which is disclosed here and on every page that links to it. What we can say about it is narrow: the network describes it as having sign-up, first play and purchase as the events it pays commission on, which tells you it has an account and a shop, and nothing more. Everything else — price, currency, classification, device support, chat settings — is for you to read on the vendor's own site against the six answers you just wrote.

Visit the Star Stable Online websitePaid link. Subtle Shift is paid a commission for sign-ups made through it; your price is unaffected, and this step reads the same whether you follow it or not.

The worked example, Step 2