Calm Trait · beginners' workbook

Step 1 of 5

What a free online PC game actually is

Before you check whether your computer can run anything, it helps to know what you are being offered. This step takes apart the sentence "it is a free online game" and shows you the four separate claims hiding inside it.

The three prices that get muddled together

When somebody tells you a game is free, they are usually making one narrow claim: the software itself can be downloaded and played without paying for it. That claim is often true. It is also only one of three prices attached to playing a game on a computer, and the other two are rarely mentioned in the same breath.

The first price is the game itself. Some games are sold once, for a fixed amount, like buying a book. Others are distributed at no charge and make their money another way. A game in the second group is usually described as free to play, which is a business model rather than a promise.

The second price is what the game sells to you once you are inside it. This can be cosmetic — things that change how a character looks — or it can be items, currency, time savers, or access to parts of the game that are otherwise slow to reach. Those purchases are real purchases in Australian dollars, charged to a real card. Step 4 of this course is about nothing else.

The third price is the hardware. A game that costs nothing to download may still need a computer that costs a great deal, and no amount of free software changes that. This is the price people most often discover last, usually after an hour of downloading. Step 2 is how you avoid that order of events.

Keeping these three apart is most of what this step is for. A game can be genuinely free on the first count, substantial on the second, and impossible on the third, all at the same time, and none of those facts contradicts the others.

What a game client is

A client is the program that runs on your computer and shows you the game. The word is used because, for an online game, your computer is a client of a server somewhere else: your machine draws the picture and reads your keyboard, and a computer owned by the publisher keeps the authoritative version of what is happening.

Three practical things follow from that. The client is a piece of software you install, so it takes disk space, needs permission to install, and can be removed again. The client is updated regularly, usually automatically, and those updates are often large. And the client cannot do anything on its own: if the publisher's servers are down or the game is retired, the program on your disk stops being useful. You are not buying a thing that sits on a shelf.

Some publishers distribute their client through their own website. Others distribute through a storefront — a larger program that manages a library of games from many publishers and handles installing and updating them. Either way you end up with two layers of software: the storefront if there is one, and the game itself. Both take space, and both want to start when your computer starts unless you tell them otherwise.

There is a separate meaning of "download" that is worth keeping straight. Downloading a client from the publisher's own site, or from a storefront you chose to install, is ordinary. Downloading a game client from a link in a message, a forum post or an advertisement is not, because you have no way to know what you actually received. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance on software and device security that applies here as it does anywhere else.

What the word "online" adds

An online game needs a working internet connection for as long as you are playing, not just while installing. If the connection drops, the game stops. That is normal and is not a fault in your computer.

Online also means other people. In a multiplayer game, the people you encounter are other players, with everything that implies: some pleasant, some not. Most games provide a way to mute, block or report another player, and finding those controls before you need them is sensible. The eSafety Commissioner publishes material on online gaming and how to deal with unwanted behaviour.

Finally, online means data moves. Your account, your settings and your progress sit on the publisher's servers, under the publisher's privacy policy, not on your computer and not under ours. Step 3 covers what that means when you register.

Reading a publisher's page without being surprised

Publisher pages are marketing, and marketing is allowed to be enthusiastic. It is not allowed to be misleading: under the Australian Consumer Law, misleading or deceptive conduct in trade is prohibited, and the ACCC explains and enforces those obligations. That still leaves a wide gap between "accurate" and "complete", and the gap is where beginners get caught.

Four things are worth finding on any publisher page before you go further, and all four are usually present if you look past the headline.

1. What it costs to start. If the page says the game is free, look for the words that qualify it — "free to play", "optional purchases", "in-app purchases" — and take them at face value rather than as fine print.
2. What it sells inside. A publisher usually lists the kinds of purchases available somewhere, even if it is not on the front page. If you cannot find it, that is information too.
3. What it runs on. Operating systems supported, and the minimum and recommended specifications. Note whether the game lists macOS and Linux or only Windows, because that single line decides a lot.
4. Who publishes it. A company name and a contact route. A game with no identifiable publisher is a game with nobody to complain to.

As an illustration, the game used as this course's running example, Enlisted, is described by the affiliate network that operates our link as a new game set in the atmosphere of the Second World War, and its sign-up consists of registration, confirming an email address and launching the game. That is all we state about it, because anything further — its requirements, its contents, what it sells — belongs to the publisher, who may change it tomorrow.

Visit the Enlisted website

Paid affiliate link. Evropastar s.r.o. may be paid a commission if you register through it. It changes nothing about your price, and this step works perfectly well if you never follow it.

Glossary of the words you will meet

The worked example

Our hypothetical Brisbane household — two adults, one five-year-old Windows laptop, no previous experience installing games — reads a publisher page together. The headline says the game costs nothing. Working through the four questions above, they establish that the download is free, that there are optional purchases they have not yet examined, that the page lists Windows but they are not sure what the hardware line means, and that a company name and support address exist.

That is a successful Step 1. They have not decided anything, they have not installed anything, and they now have one clear open question — the hardware line — which happens to be the subject of Step 2. Noticing what you do not yet know is the actual output of this step.

Before you move on

You should now be able to say, about any particular game, whether the software costs money, whether the game sells things inside itself, and whether you know what hardware it asks for. If you can answer the first two and not the third, you are exactly where you should be at the end of Step 1.

If the game you are looking at has no identifiable publisher, no listed requirements and no explanation of what it sells, the reasonable response is to stop looking at that one. There is no urgency here, and nothing in this course needs to be finished by any particular date.

Step 1 checklist

Work through these with the publisher page open in front of you. Tick them on paper; this page does not remember anything.

1. Write down the exact name of the game and the name of the company publishing it.
2. Find and write down what the game costs to download.
3. Find and write down whether the game sells anything inside itself, and roughly what kind of thing.
4. Find the supported operating systems and note whether yours is listed.
5. Find the minimum and recommended specifications and copy them down, even if they mean nothing to you yet.
6. Find a support or contact route for the publisher and note it.
7. Note whether the game requires a separate storefront program, or installs on its own.
8. Write one sentence saying what you still do not understand. Carry it into Step 2.

— end of step one — proceed when ready —