LOT 04-15

Step 5 of 5

Step 5 — First sessions, settings and stopping

The last step is about the first evening and every evening after it: which settings to change before you play, how to run a session on purpose rather than by accident, and how to walk away from a game cleanly when it turns out not to suit you.

The first ten minutes, before you play

Every game in this category puts its settings behind a menu, and almost nobody opens it before playing. Ten minutes spent there first makes the difference between an evening that works and an evening spent squinting at a stuttering screen.

Four groups are worth your attention, in this order.

Display. Set the resolution to match your monitor rather than something higher, and start at a low or medium quality preset — you can raise it later once you know the game runs. If the game offers a frame-rate limit or a vertical-sync option, leaving it on is the quieter choice, particularly on a laptop, because it stops the hardware working harder than the screen can show.

Audio. Turn the master volume down before the first launch. Game audio is often mixed loud by default, and the first five seconds of a new install at full volume is a genuinely unpleasant way to start.

Privacy, chat and social. This is the group people skip and later wish they had not. Decide who can message you, who can see your profile and activity, and whether voice chat is on by default. In a shared household these are not preferences, they are the household's settings.

Controls. Look at the key bindings once so you know what exists, and particularly how to pause, how to mute and how to quit. Knowing how to leave is a surprisingly useful thing to learn before you need it.

When it runs badly: what to change first

If the picture stutters or the controls feel delayed, resist the urge to change ten things at once. Work down this order, one change at a time, and give each a minute of play before judging it.

1. Close everything else — browser tabs, video calls, streaming, downloads. This alone fixes a surprising share of problems, especially on machines with integrated graphics.
2. Lower the quality preset one level. Most games have a single preset control that moves a dozen settings together.
3. Lower the resolution one step below your monitor's native resolution if the preset change was not enough.
4. Turn off the heaviest individual effects — shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing — one at a time. These usually cost the most for the least visible benefit on a small screen.
5. Update your graphics drivers from the hardware manufacturer's own site, and no other site.
6. On a laptop, plug in the power adapter and check that the operating system is not in a battery-saving mode.

If the game still does not run acceptably, that is information rather than a defeat: your machine and this title are not a good match today. Step 2's four numbers are what you compare against the next candidate.

Other people: chat, reporting and blocking

An online game is a room with strangers in it. Most of them are fine. The small number who are not are handled by tools that every service of this kind provides: muting, blocking and reporting.

Find those three before you need them. Muting is usually per player and immediate. Blocking is stronger and usually prevents messages entirely. Reporting sends the matter to the vendor's moderation team, and is the one that affects anyone other than you.

For Australian readers, the eSafety Commissioner — Australia's independent regulator for online safety — publishes general guidance on online games, on what can be reported to a service, and on what can be reported to the Commissioner when a service does not act. It is written for parents and for adults dealing with their own situations, and it is worth reading one page of it while things are calm rather than at the point of needing it.

In a household with a young person, one small practice is worth more than any setting: play in a shared room, and ask about the game occasionally in an ordinary tone. Children tell adults about things they are asked about casually. They tell nobody about things that only ever come up in an argument.

Running a session on purpose

Online games with progression systems are designed to reward returning, and some of them are designed to reward returning today specifically. Daily tasks, streaks and limited-time events are all variations on the same mechanism. None of this is wicked, and all of it works better on the game's behalf than on yours if you never decide anything in advance.

The remedy is small and boring. Decide the finishing time before you start, and set a timer that is not inside the game. Decide it based on what else is happening that evening rather than on a round number. If you find yourself reasoning that the current match does not count, that reasoning is exactly the thing the timer is for.

Physical setup matters more than people expect in a long session. Screen roughly at arm's length and the top of it at about eye level; wrists straight rather than bent back; a light on in the room so the screen is not the only bright thing in it; a few minutes away from the desk each hour. Tiredness arrives as irritation long before it arrives as sleepiness, and an evening that ends in irritation is not a good advertisement for a hobby.

One general note about safety that belongs here rather than in a scare: the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes guidance for individuals on keeping software updated and on account security, and Scamwatch describes the kinds of approach currently reported, including offers of free in-game items in exchange for account details. Reading either once a year is enough. Neither of them, and nothing on this page, suggests anything is wrong with your computer right now.

Living with updates

Patches arrive on the vendor's schedule. A game you have not opened for a month will usually want a substantial download before it will start, which is worth knowing when you have forty minutes free and plan to spend them playing.

Two habits make this manageable. If your connection has a monthly allowance, mark it as metered in your operating system so large updates are not fetched automatically in the background. And if you know you will play on Friday, open the launcher on Thursday so that the update happens while you are doing something else.

Patches also change games. A balance change can make the thing you enjoyed less effective, and content updates can shift where other players spend their time. This is normal for an online title and worth knowing in advance, because it is one of the real differences between a service that keeps running and a game you bought once and own in a fixed state.

Deciding it is not for you

The most under-used skill in this hobby is stopping cleanly. A game you are not enjoying is not an obligation, an investment or a sunk cost; it is a program on a drive.

A reasonable way to decide: give it three sessions. The first is spent fighting the interface and learning words. The second is the first honest one. The third tells you whether the second was a fluke. If after three you are opening it out of habit rather than interest, that is your answer, and it is not a verdict on the game or on you.

Stopping well has three parts. Uninstall through the operating system's own apps-and-features list or the launcher's uninstall option, which reclaims the disk space. Note that the account still exists, with the email address attached to it, so a future password-reset message is not a mystery. And if you want the account itself removed, look for the account-deletion process in the vendor's privacy notice or support pages — most services document one, and the privacy notice is usually where it is described rather than in the settings menu.

If you spent money and feel that what you were sold was not what you received, the vendor's support is the first step and your consumer rights in Australia are explained by the ACCC. Those rights apply to digital products and they are not waived by a tick box.

The household in Step 5

The hypothetical household spends ten minutes in the settings before the first session: resolution matched to the monitor, low quality preset, volume down, messages limited, voice chat off. They agree a finishing time of 9 pm and set the kitchen timer, which is harder to argue with than a phone.

The game stutters at first. They close the browser, drop one preset level, and it settles. Two weeks later they open the launcher on a Thursday so that Friday's session is not spent watching a progress bar, and they mark the connection as metered because of the data allowance they wrote down in Step 2.

Whether the teenager is still playing in three months is not something this course predicts, and this household reports no results. What the example shows is that every decision in the five steps was made before it was urgent.