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Classification, chat and rules for the household

Step five of seven. Australia has a national classification scheme and an online safety regulator, and between them they answer part of the question a parent or carer is actually asking. This page explains what each one covers, what neither of them covers, and which decisions are left to the household.

Where Australian classification information comes from

Computer games distributed in Australia are classified under the national classification scheme, and the Australian Classification Board publishes the classifications and the consumer advice that accompanies them. The searchable national database is at classification.gov.au, and it is the source worth using — a store listing, a summary page or an age badge inside an app is a secondary description of it at best.

This site does not state a classification for any particular title, including the one it covers, because a classification is a fact on a public register rather than something a third party should assert from memory. Look the exact title up yourself: it takes less than a minute, it gives you the consumer advice as well as the rating, and the register is the thing that is actually current.

Chat, contact and other players

A persistent online world means other people, most of them strangers, some of them adults where the player is a child. Publishers handle this differently — filtered chat, preset phrases, chat restricted by account age, chat off by default, or none of those — and the only way to know which applies is to look in the game's own settings before handing the device over.

Three practical steps cover most of it. Find the chat and privacy settings and go through them deliberately rather than accepting defaults. Find the block and report controls, and make sure the player knows where they are, because a child who knows how to block someone is in a considerably better position than one who does not. Agree that anything uncomfortable gets mentioned to an adult without anyone losing access to the game as a consequence — a rule that ends in confiscation is a rule that guarantees silence.

The eSafety Commissioner is Australia's independent regulator for online safety and publishes practical guidance for parents, carers and young people at esafety.gov.au. It also operates reporting schemes for serious online abuse, including cyberbullying material targeting an Australian child; the details of what can be reported and how are set out on its own site.

The settings worth changing on day one

• Chat and messaging: on, off, filtered, or restricted to known contacts — decided rather than defaulted.
• Display name: nothing that reveals a real name, a school, a suburb or a birth year.
• Friend or contact requests: whether strangers can send them, and who reviews them.
• Purchase approval at the device or app-store level, covered in step four.
• The email address attached to the account, which for a younger player should be one an adult reads.
• Where the device is used. A shared room remains the single most effective control anyone has found, and it requires no software.

Time, and the argument about it

Online games of this kind are built to reward returning: daily activities, timed events, things that continue while you are away. That is not sinister, but it does mean the game supplies a reason to keep playing at the exact moment a household wants the device put down. Deciding in advance when play happens, rather than adjudicating it each evening, turns a recurring argument into a settled arrangement.

A workable version tends to include a predictable window, a warning before it ends, and some flexibility for the genuinely awkward cases — an event that finishes at an inconvenient hour, a friend who is only online at a particular time. Rigidity invites negotiation; predictability does not. The eSafety Commissioner's material for families discusses balance in more detail and is written for Australian households.

Randomised items, and why they get separate consideration

Some games sell items whose contents are not known before purchase. Whether any particular title does so is a question for the game itself and the vendor's own material, and the entry in the national classification database may carry consumer advice relating to in-game purchases. It is worth checking specifically, because the spending pattern it produces differs from a straightforward purchase: the value is uncertain at the point of paying, and the natural response to a disappointing result is to pay again.

A household that has decided in advance how it handles this — a fixed allowance, a rule that randomised purchases are not made, or simply an agreement to ask first — has an easier time than one deciding in the moment. This site does not present any game containing purchasable randomised items as suitable for a child; that judgement belongs to the classification register, to the vendor's disclosures and to the adults in the house, in that order.

Where to go when something goes wrong

• eSafety Commissioner — Australia's online safety regulator, with reporting schemes for serious online abuse and guidance for parents, carers and young people.
• Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre — where scams, including those aimed at game accounts, can be reported and read about.
• Australian Cyber Security Centre — practical advice on securing and recovering accounts.
• Office of the Australian Information Commissioner — the privacy regulator, for complaints about how personal information has been handled.
• The game's own report and block controls, which are usually the fastest route for behaviour inside the game itself.