CH 03

Step 3 — Registration, email confirmation and account safety

Step 3 of 5

Making an account is where a game stops being a download and starts being a relationship with a company. The form is short, the confirmation email is routine, and almost nothing about it is difficult — but the decisions you make in those two minutes are the ones you live with for years, and they are also the moment impersonators aim at.

LOG 03-1 // 01:22

What a registration form actually asks for

Across this category, sign-up forms are remarkably similar, and knowing the standard shape makes an unusual request stand out.

Almost always required: an email address, which identifies the account; a password; and a display name or nickname that other players see. Very often required: your date of birth or a confirmation that you are above a given age, which exists so the publisher can apply age-appropriate rules; and a tick to say you accept the terms of service and have read the privacy notice.

Sometimes present but optional: a country or region, which may be used to choose a default server or a currency; a marketing consent box, which you can leave unticked; and a referral or promotional code field, which you can leave empty.

Not normally asked for at sign-up, by any mainstream publisher: your full residential address, a payment card where nothing is being bought, a photograph of an identity document, a phone number as an unavoidable requirement, or remote access to your computer. If you meet one of those on what you believe is a game registration page, stop and check where you are. That list is a general rule of thumb, not a legal standard — but it is a rule of thumb that saves a lot of grief.

LOG 03-2 // 01:40

Why a confirmation email exists

After you submit the form, most publishers send an email with a link or a code, and the account is not fully active until you use it. This is often called double opt-in: you ask for the account on the website, then you confirm from inside the mailbox, which proves that the person asking controls that address.

It serves three purposes simultaneously. It establishes that the address is real and reachable, so the publisher can contact you about the account rather than shouting into a void. It makes bulk creation of fake accounts more expensive, which matters in multiplayer games where disposable accounts are used to evade bans. And it gives you a recovery route: if you forget your password, the mailbox is how you prove the account is yours.

That last point is the one to hold on to. In practice, in most online games, whoever controls the email address controls the account. Everything else — the password, the display name, the items you have earned — follows from that. So the mailbox is not a formality at the start of the process; it is the actual key.

LOG 03-3 // 01:58

Choosing the email address you will use

You have three reasonable options, and it is worth making the choice deliberately rather than typing whichever address your browser offers first.

Your main personal address. Simple and always accessible. The cost is that game accounts, launchers and newsletters end up mixed with correspondence that matters, and anything that goes wrong with the mailbox affects both.

A separate address used only for games and similar accounts. This keeps things tidy, makes it obvious when a message is out of place, and limits the damage if a game service has a problem. The cost is remembering to check it, which matters because recovery messages arrive there.

A disposable or temporary address. Tempting and usually a mistake. If you lose access to it, you lose the account permanently, and there is often no one who can help you.

Whichever you choose, use an address you will still have in three years. And remember that a display name is public while an email address generally is not — do not use the same string for both if the address is one you care about.

LOG 03-4 // 02:16

Passwords and a second factor

Two general practices do most of the work here, and both are standard public guidance rather than anything specific to games. The first is a unique password for each account, long rather than clever, and stored somewhere other than your memory — a password manager, or a written note kept physically safe. The second is turning on multi-factor authentication where the service offers it, so that a password alone is not enough to get in.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes plain-language guidance for individuals on passphrases and multi-factor authentication, and it is the source to follow rather than anything we could summarise here. Game accounts are worth protecting for the same reason as any other: they accumulate value and they are tied to a mailbox.

LOG 03-5 // 02:34

Telling a real message from an imitation

Popular games attract imitation: pages that resemble an official site, and emails that resemble an official notice. The general patterns are well documented by Scamwatch, the Australian service that collects and describes current scam methods, and the gaming variants follow the same shapes as everything else.

A few habits that apply generally. Reach a publisher's site by typing the address or using a link you have saved, rather than by clicking the first result you see. When an email asks you to confirm something, open the service yourself in a new window instead of following the link, and check whether the same message appears in your account there. Treat urgency as a signal to slow down: a genuine confirmation email asks you to confirm an address, while an imitation tends to warn that something will be lost if you do not act immediately. Be sceptical of offers of items or currency in exchange for your sign-in details, which no legitimate publisher asks for.

If something does go wrong, Scamwatch takes reports, and the eSafety Commissioner provides help with online safety matters including those arising in games.

LOG 03-6 // 02:52

If the confirmation email does not arrive

This is common and almost never serious. Work through it in order.

1. Wait five minutes. Delivery is usually quick but not instant.
2. Check the junk or spam folder, and any "promotions" or "updates" category your mail provider uses.
3. Search the mailbox for the publisher's name rather than scrolling, in case the message was filed somewhere unexpected.
4. Check that the address you typed is the address you meant. A single wrong character sends the message to nobody.
5. Use the "resend confirmation" option on the publisher's own site, which almost all of them provide.
6. If your mail provider lets you, add the publisher's sending domain to your accepted senders, then resend.
7. If it still does not arrive, try registering with a different address at a different provider, since occasionally one provider rejects a sender outright.
8. Only then contact the publisher's support, with the address you used and the approximate time you registered.

LOG 03-7 // 03:10

The example used in this course

The title used as the concrete example in this course is Enlisted, which the affiliate network describes as a new game set in the atmosphere of the Second World War, available for desktop computers running Windows, macOS or Linux. The registration process the network describes is the standard one this step has just walked through: you register, you confirm your email address, and then you sign in to the game.

That is also, candidly, the point at which we are paid. Our commission is tied to a reader registering and confirming an email address, which is why this step rather than any other names the title. We have not been told what the game costs, what it contains or what it requires, so we do not say. The vendor's own site does.

Visit the Enlisted website Paid link. Gray Tempo is paid a commission if you register and confirm your email address after following it. What you pay, if anything, is unchanged.

If you would rather not use our link, you can type the publisher's address into your browser directly. The course is written to be equally useful either way, and nothing later in it depends on that choice.

LOG 03-8 // 03:26

Before you move on

Step 4 moves to money and suitability: how games are classified in Australia, how in-game purchases are structured, and how to decide in advance what you are prepared to spend.

LOG 03-9 // 03:38

Checklist 3 — Making the account