Your first session, and what comes after it

The last step covers the part nobody writes down: what actually happens between double-clicking the icon and deciding whether you liked it, and then what to do over the following months — including how to leave cleanly if the answer is no.

A realistic timeline for the first evening

People are often surprised by how much of a first session is not playing. Allowing for that in advance removes most of the frustration.

What the first evening usually consists of
Stage	What happens	Rough share of the evening
Download	The client, and often a storefront first. Size depends entirely on the game; it is frequently tens of gigabytes.	Usually the largest single block
Install and unpack	The computer writes the files out. It needs more space than the download.	Ten to thirty minutes is common
First update	A patch released since the installer was built. Often downloads immediately.	A few minutes to a long while
Sign in	The account from Step 3, plus the second factor if you turned it on.	A minute
Settings and tutorial	Graphics, audio, controls, chat; then whatever introduction the game provides.	Fifteen to forty minutes
Actually playing	The part you came for.	Whatever is left

The honest conclusion is to start the download at a time when you do not mind it taking the evening, and to treat the first real play as something that happens the next day. People who expect to be playing within ten minutes are the ones who end up annoyed.

What the first launch looks like

The first time the game runs, several ordinary things happen that can look alarming if you have not seen them before.

The screen may go black for ten or twenty seconds while the display mode changes. The computer's fans may become loud, because three-dimensional rendering works the hardware harder than anything else most people run. Your operating system may ask whether to allow the program through the firewall, which it asks because the game needs the internet; allowing it for your home network is the expected answer. And the first few minutes may stutter while the game compiles and caches things it will not need to recompute later.

What should not happen is a message claiming your computer is infected, a window demanding payment to continue, or a prompt to install something unrelated. If that appears, close it without clicking inside it, and reconsider where the installer came from. Downloading from the publisher's own site or from a storefront you chose, as Step 1 described, is what prevents this.

Loud fans and a black screen for a few seconds are normal. A pop-up telling you that you are at risk is not part of any game.

The settings worth changing before you play

Four groups of settings, in the order that saves the most grief.

Graphics. If Step 2 put you near the minimum, start at the lowest preset and in a window rather than full screen. You can raise settings afterwards from a working baseline; diagnosing a crash at maximum settings is far harder. Most games have an automatic detection option, which is a reasonable starting guess rather than an answer.

Audio. Set the volume before the first loud moment. If voice chat exists, decide now whether your microphone is on, and assume that anything it hears is heard by strangers.

Chat and contact. Find out how to mute, block and report another player before you need it. Decide whether people who are not on your friends list can message you. For anybody under 18 this is not optional, as Step 4 set out.

Controls. Leave them alone the first evening. The defaults are what every guide and every other player assumes, and remapping before you know what the actions are mostly creates confusion.

Dispatched

Stopping, and why it is a skill worth having

Online games are built to be easy to continue and awkward to leave: matches end and immediately offer another, rewards arrive for consecutive days, and progress bars sit visibly short of the next mark. None of that is sinister, but all of it is deliberate, and it works better on people who have not noticed it.

Two simple countermeasures are enough for most people. Decide the stopping point before you start — an amount of time, or a specific thing to finish — and set a timer outside the game, because clocks inside a game are easy to ignore. And when you stop, close the program rather than leaving it minimised, since a running game is an invitation that costs nothing to accept.

If you find that stopping is genuinely difficult, that is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a character flaw, and it is a conversation for a health professional rather than a web page. This course is about setting up software, and it will not pretend to be more than that.

Looking after it over the following months

A game you keep playing becomes a small ongoing obligation. Four habits keep it a small one.

Check the bank statement monthly against the limit you wrote in Step 4. This is the one that catches a subscription nobody remembers starting.
Keep the client and the operating system updated. Updates carry security fixes as well as content, and an out-of-date client often simply refuses to connect.
Watch the disk. Games grow. If the drive is filling up, the game is usually the reason, and the operating system needs room of its own.
Re-read a message before acting on it. Messages about your account, including ones about purchases you did not make, are a common pretext. The habits in Step 3 apply for as long as the account exists, and Scamwatch publishes what is currently circulating.

If your account is accessed by someone else, change the password, turn on two-factor authentication if you had not, and contact the publisher's support through the route you bookmarked in Step 3. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general advice on compromised accounts, and the national reporting route for cybercrime is through its site.

Leaving cleanly

Deciding a game is not for you is a normal outcome, and the course has said from the start that it is. Leaving properly has three parts.

Uninstall the game. Use the storefront's own uninstall if you installed through one, or your operating system's applications list if you did not. Dragging a folder to the bin leaves settings behind.
Decide about the storefront. If you installed one only for this game and will not use it again, remove it too, and check your startup items so it stops launching with the computer.
Deal with the account. Uninstalling the software does not close the account. If you want the account and its data removed, use the publisher's account closure process — the one you bookmarked in Step 3. If you would rather keep it dormant, at least turn off the marketing emails and make sure the password is not used anywhere else.

Where personal information is held by an organisation covered by Australian privacy law, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner explains your access and correction rights and how to complain if a request goes nowhere.

The worked example

Our hypothetical household starts the download after dinner and goes to bed before it finishes. The next evening they sign in, set graphics to the lowest preset in a window — as their Step 2 sheet suggested they should — turn the microphone off, and spend most of an hour on the introduction. The laptop is loud and warm, and the game is playable rather than impressive, which is exactly what the five numbers predicted.

They agree to try it for two weeks at zero spending and to look again after that. The running example used throughout this course, Enlisted, reaches this point by the same route as any other title of its kind: register, confirm the address, launch, as the network operating our link describes the flow. Everything specific to it — what it looks like, what it asks of your hardware, what it offers inside — is the publisher's to state, on the publisher's own site.

Visit the Enlisted website

Paid affiliate link. Evropastar s.r.o. may be paid a commission if you register through it. It costs you nothing extra, and the course is complete without it.

Before you finish

You have reached the end of the course. You can read a publisher's page, measure your own computer, register and confirm an account safely, look up a classification, set a spending limit, run a first session and leave cleanly. That is the whole of what this workbook set out to teach, and none of it required you to spend anything.

The checklists are the part worth keeping. All five are on one page, laid out to print on paper, so the next time you or somebody in your house tries a new game the work is a quarter of an hour rather than an evening.

Step 5 checklist

Start the download at a time when it can take as long as it takes.
Check free disk space again before installing, allowing more than the stated size.
Allow the game through the firewall for your home network when asked.
Set graphics to the lowest preset, in a window, for the first session.
Set the audio level and decide whether the microphone is on.
Find the mute, block and report controls before you play.
Decide your stopping point and set a timer outside the game.
Close the program when you stop, rather than minimising it.
Put a monthly statement check in your calendar.
If you decide against the game: uninstall it, remove the storefront if unused, and close or secure the account.

— end of course — all five steps complete —