Brief 05-1Step 1 of 5

Step 1 — What these games actually are, and what an account is for

Before anything is installed, it helps to know what sort of thing you are installing. This step describes the category from the outside: what runs where, who you are playing against, and why a game you have not paid for still wants an email address from you.

The plain description

An online multiplayer vehicle game is a program you run on your own computer, in which you control one machine — an aircraft, a tank, a ship — inside a match shared with other people who are doing the same thing from their own computers, somewhere else. The match does not exist on your computer. It exists on a computer run by the game's publisher, and your machine draws a picture of it for you several dozen times a second.

That is the whole idea. Everything else in the category is decoration on top of it: the period the vehicles come from, whether the controls are simplified or fussy, how many people are in a match, whether there is a story. The structural facts are the ones that matter for a beginner, because they are what determine whether the thing will work on your machine and what you have to agree to before it does.

It is worth saying what this is not. It is not a single-player game you own on a disc, a browser page you open and close, or an app from a phone store. The category sits in an older tradition: a substantial program installed on a desktop computer, kept up to date by the publisher, and useless without an internet connection, because the other players are the point.

Three pieces: client, server, match

The client is the program on your computer. It is usually several gigabytes, sometimes tens of gigabytes, and it holds the models, textures and sounds — the heavy material that would be wasteful to send over the internet every time you play. When people say a game is "downloading", this is what is downloading.

The server is the publisher's computer. It keeps the authoritative version of what is happening: where every vehicle is, who shot what, who won. Your client tells the server what you are pressing; the server tells your client what everyone else did. If the server is far away, that round trip takes longer, and the game feels less responsive. This matters more in Australia than in most places, for the obvious geographic reason, and it is covered in Step 2.

The match is one session: a group of players put together by the server, a map, and an end condition. Matches in this category usually run somewhere between a few minutes and half an hour. You join one, it ends, you join another. There is no save file to lose and no single long campaign you must finish.

A fourth piece sits between you and the client on many games: a launcher, a small program that checks for updates, downloads them, and then starts the game proper. Step 4 deals with them.

Why this category is a desktop one

These games ask a lot of a machine: a large amount of storage for the client, enough memory to hold a map and dozens of vehicles at once, and a graphics processor capable of drawing all of it smoothly. That combination lives in desktop and laptop computers. The practical consequence for you is simple — if you do not have a computer running Windows, macOS or Linux, this course's practical steps do not apply to you.

The specific game used as the example throughout this course states desktop platforms only: Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no mobile version in the material we have been given, so we do not describe one, and you should not assume one exists because an unrelated game has one.

What the platform restriction means in practice

You have a Windows, macOS or Linux desktop or laptop	The rest of this course applies. Go to Step 2 and find out what is inside it.
You only have a phone or tablet	The course is still readable, but there is nothing for you to install. Nothing further is needed from you.
You have a games console	Consoles are a separate world with their own stores, accounts and rules. This course does not cover them and does not try to.
You have a very old computer	Possibly still fine, possibly not. Step 2 is how you find out instead of guessing.

What an account is actually for

Every game in this category requires an account before you can play. People often read that as a marketing trick. Mostly it is not. Because the match lives on the publisher's server and not on your machine, the server needs a way to know which player is which — to put your progress on the right record, to apply a ban to the right person, and to stop someone else from claiming your name.

An account in this context means three things stored on the publisher's side: a login name, a secret only you know, and a way to reach you. The secret is your password. The way to reach you is an email address. That is the minimum. Some publishers ask for more; none of them has to.

What you give up by having an account is worth being clear about. The publisher now knows an email address of yours and can see when you play and what you do inside the game. They may use that for their own purposes under their own privacy policy, which is a document on their site, not ours. In Australia, your rights over personal information held about you are set out in the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles; the regulator that explains them is the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Reading a publisher's privacy policy before you sign up is a reasonable twenty minutes, and nobody will ever make you do it.

Why the email confirmation step exists

Almost every sign-up in this category ends with the same pattern: you submit a form, nothing much happens, and a message arrives in your inbox with a link or a code in it. Until you use that link or code, the account is only half made. That is the confirmation step, and it exists for two reasons that have nothing to do with selling you anything.

The first is that it proves the address is real and that you control it. Without that proof, anyone could register thousands of accounts using invented addresses, and the publisher could never contact a player about a security problem or a password reset. The second is that it protects people whose address is typed in by mistake, or on purpose, by somebody else: if you did not ask for an account, you simply do not click, and the half-made account expires.

The practical consequence is that the address you use at sign-up matters. If you lose access to it, you may eventually lose access to the account, because the reset path runs through the inbox. Step 3 is entirely about getting this part right, and about telling a genuine confirmation email from one of the fakes that imitate them — Scamwatch, Australia's scam reporting service, publishes descriptions of how those imitations are usually built.

The example used in this course

So the pattern can be followed against something real rather than an abstraction, this course uses one title as its example: War Thunder, an online game in which players take part in matches using military vehicles. The material supplied to us describes it as an online game whose sign-up is complete once a new player has registered, confirmed the email address used to register, and logged in. It lists desktop platforms — Windows, macOS and Linux — and no others.

That is everything we have been told, and so it is everything we will say. We do not know what it costs, what is inside the client, how large the download is, how many players are in a match, or what the controls are like, so we do not state any of those things. The place to find them is the game's own website. If anything in this course conflicts with what the publisher says on their own pages, believe the publisher.

Words you will meet

Before you move on

You should now be able to say, in one sentence each, what a client is, what a server does, and why the sign-up ends with an email. You should also know whether you have a machine this category can run on at all — not whether it runs well, which is Step 2, but whether it is the right kind of machine.

Nothing has been installed. No account has been made. You have not committed to anything, and if you decide at this point that the whole category is not for you, that is a perfectly good outcome of Step 1.