Step 1 — What an online game account actually involves

Someone in your household has asked you to let them play a game that runs online. Before you decide anything, it helps to know what is actually being created when you say yes. That is all this step does. There is nothing to install, nothing to sign and nothing to buy to get through it.

What an account is, in plain words

An account is a record held by the company that runs the game, on their computers rather than yours, that says this person exists and this is what belongs to them. It is not a file on your laptop. If the laptop is thrown in a river, the account is unaffected; if the company switches its servers off, the account is gone and nothing on your laptop brings it back.

That ownership arrangement is the single most useful idea in this step, and it explains most of what follows. The player does not own the character in the way they own a bicycle. They hold a licence to use something the company stores and runs, on terms the company writes, and those terms can change.

A server is simply one of the company's computers that other people's devices connect to. When a game is described as "online", it means the game will not work without reaching a server. That matters practically: no internet connection, no game, and the household should expect that before the first school holiday road trip, not during it.

An account usually gathers three things over time. There is the login — an email address and a password. There is the profile — a chosen display name and whatever the player has set up inside the game. And there is the purchase history, which may be empty for a long time, and which is the part most people fail to think about until it is not empty any more.

What "free to play" covers, and what it does not

Many online games can be started without paying. The usual term for this arrangement is free to play, and it is worth being precise about what the words cover, because a lot of household arguments start in the gap between what an adult assumed and what a child understood.

Free to play ordinarily means that creating the account and beginning to play costs nothing. It does not usually mean that the whole game is available at no cost, that no part of it is sold separately, or that nothing inside it can be bought. Most games built this way sell something: an ongoing membership, a one-off pack, an in-game currency bought with real money, or decorative items.

The honest way to hold this in your head is that "free" describes the front door, not the house. A game can be entirely enjoyable without spending, and many are, and at the same time be designed so that spending is always one tap away. Both things are true at once, and neither is hidden or sinister. It is simply the business model.

For the one product this course names as an example, the vendor is the only source worth trusting on what is and is not paid. The affiliate network that operates our link states that the programme pays this publisher when someone signs up, plays for the first time, and makes a purchase. That tells you money changes hands somewhere in the arrangement; it does not tell you what any particular item costs. For that, read the vendor's own pages.

Visit the Star Stable Online website

What the company ends up holding

Once an account exists, the game company holds some information about the person using it. Exactly what, and for how long, is set out in that company's own privacy policy, which is a document you are entitled to read before you create anything. Reading it is Step 3's work; knowing that it exists is this step's.

In general, an online game account will involve at least an email address, a password stored in some scrambled form, a display name, a record of when the account was used, and the internet address the player connected from. If anything was ever bought, there will be a billing record as well, although payment card details are usually held by a payment company rather than by the game.

Your rights over that information in Australia come from the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, which the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains in plain language on its website. Whether and how those rules reach a particular overseas game company is a legal question this site will not pretend to answer. The useful habit is simpler: assume that anything typed into an account form is held by somebody else, possibly in another country, and decide what you are comfortable typing on that basis.

The email address is the account

Almost every online game treats the email address as the identity. It is what you type to log in, and it is where a reset link is sent if the password is forgotten. Whoever can read that mailbox can take control of the account. This single fact decides most of the sensible choices in Step 4.

Three arrangements are common in Australian households, and each has a cost.

The first is registering with a parent's or carer's main email address. The adult keeps control, including control of any reset. The cost is clutter in a mailbox used for work and bills, and awkwardness later when a teenager reasonably wants their own account.

The second is registering with a brand-new address made specifically for games. The adult still sets it up and holds the password, but it keeps game mail separate and transfers easily when the child is older. The cost is one more mailbox for somebody to check.

The third is registering with the young person's own existing address. This suits older teenagers and suits nobody under about thirteen, because it quietly hands over the ability to reset the password and so to undo any setting an adult puts in place.

Why the password matters more here than you would think

Game accounts are a regular target for people trying to take them over, for the plain reason that accounts with items attached to them can be resold. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes free, plain-language guidance on passwords and on protecting accounts at cyber.gov.au, and it is worth ten minutes of reading before you create anything.

The general shape of its advice, which applies to every account and not only to games, is that a long passphrase of several unrelated words beats a short complicated one, that a password used on one service should never be used on another, and that an extra verification step at login — often called two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication — is the single most useful thing you can switch on where a service offers it.

Whether any particular game offers that extra step is a question for that game's own account settings. Step 4 covers how to go looking for it without needing to know what it is called.

There is one more reason to care, and it has nothing to do with security in the technical sense. An account that an adult cannot get into is an account an adult cannot change their mind about. If the password lives only in an eleven-year-old's head, every later conversation about time or spending becomes a negotiation rather than a decision.

The worked example, at this step

Words used in this step

Before you move on

Checklist for Step 1