Installing from a source you trust, and the first session

Deciding where to get it from

There are generally two legitimate places a desktop game comes from: the publisher's own website, or an established digital storefront that distributes it. Either is fine. What matters is that you chose the source deliberately rather than following whichever link appeared in front of you.

A storefront has one practical advantage worth naming: updates arrive through it, and removing the game later is a single action. A publisher's own installer has the advantage of being the shortest path and of being the version the publisher controls directly. Neither is safer in principle.

What is worth avoiding is a third category: aggregator and mirror sites that repackage someone else's installer. There is no reason to accept an unknown intermediary between a publisher and your computer, and a repackaged installer is where unwanted extras tend to live.

The routine below is written in general terms on purpose. It applies to any desktop game you install, and it does not describe the screens of any particular product, because those change and because learning a sequence is more useful than memorising one company's buttons.

The installation routine

Work down this list in order. It takes about half an hour, most of which is the download running while you do something else.

1. Check your free space against the stated download size. Allow roughly double, because an installer usually needs room to unpack as well as to store the result.
2. Open the publisher's site or storefront listing directly, and confirm the address in your browser's bar is the one you expect before you type anything into it.
3. Create the account with an email address you control, a password you have not used anywhere else, and no more information than the form requires.
4. Turn on multi-factor authentication if it is offered, before you have anything in the account worth protecting.
5. Download the installer and let it finish completely before opening it. An interrupted download is the most common cause of an installer that will not start.
6. Read each screen of the installer rather than clicking through, declining any additional software, toolbars or changes to your browser settings that are offered alongside.
7. Choose the install location deliberately, putting it on a drive with room to grow rather than wherever the default points.
8. Let the first launch complete its initial update, which is often larger than the installer itself, before judging anything about the game.
9. Make a note of what you installed and when, in the same place as your spending limit. In six months this is the note that tells you what is on the machine and why.

What to watch for while it installs

Most installers are unremarkable. A few habits turn the unremarkable ones into a non-event and catch the rest.

• Any pre-ticked box offering something you did not come for. Untick it.
• A request to change your default browser or search engine. A game has no reason to want this.
• A second installer that appears after the first finishes. Read what it is before agreeing to it.
• An offer to install a separate launcher or companion program. Sometimes this is genuinely required; the publisher's own help pages will say so.
• Anything that asks for payment details during installation, before you have played a minute.

If the operating system's own protections raise a warning, do not simply click past it. Stop, read what it says, and check the publisher's support pages for whether that warning is expected for their installer. Sometimes it is, for ordinary reasons to do with how the software is signed; the point is to know which case you are in.

Registering an account

Registration is usually the first thing that happens, often on a web page rather than in the game itself. Three decisions are worth making deliberately.

The first is which email address. Use one you check, because account recovery depends on it. If you prefer to keep game correspondence separate from the rest of your life, a second address is a reasonable and ordinary thing to have.

The second is the password. A long passphrase you have not used elsewhere beats a short complicated one you have used twice. If remembering it is the obstacle, a password manager — including the one built into your browser or operating system — solves that problem adequately for a game account. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes free general guidance on passphrases and multi-factor authentication.

The third is what to tick. Marketing consent boxes are usually presented at registration, and declining them changes nothing about your ability to play. If you tick nothing you are not missing a feature; you are missing email.

The first session, in order

The first time you launch, there is a tutorial. Its job is to teach the game's systems, and it is also the moment to find out whether your machine and your settings are comfortable. Do these things in this order and you will have answered both questions in under an hour.

Start by finding the settings menu before anything else, and locate three things: the graphics quality option, the volume controls, and the way to leave the game. Knowing how to quit before you need to quit is a small comfort that matters more than it sounds.

Then play the tutorial through without changing anything, and pay attention to how the picture moves. Smooth movement that occasionally stutters during a busy moment is normal. Movement that is consistently uneven means the graphics setting is too high for your machine, which Step 2 may already have predicted.

If it is uneven, lower the graphics quality one level and play another few minutes. Repeat until it is smooth. This is the whole of performance tuning for most people, and it is far more effective than any list of settings a stranger could give you.

Finally, check the temperature of the machine and listen to the fans after twenty minutes. A warm laptop with audible fans is ordinary. A laptop too hot to rest a hand on wants better airflow before the next session.

A timeline for the first evening

Stopping at the end of that timeline, whatever the game is offering at that moment, is the single most useful habit in this course. You can always come back tomorrow. The first evening is for finding out whether the machine copes and whether you want to, not for making progress.

When something does not work

Three failures account for most first-day problems, and all three have dull fixes.

If the installer will not start, the download was probably incomplete. Delete it and download it again, letting it finish before you touch it. If it fails a second time on the same connection, try at a different time of day.

If the game starts and then closes immediately, the usual cause is a graphics driver that has not been updated in a long time. Driver updates come from your graphics chip manufacturer or through your operating system's own update mechanism, and from nowhere else — a site offering to update your drivers for you is not a site to accept help from.

If the game runs but looks wrong or stutters badly, go back to the settings and lower the quality, and confirm the laptop is on mains power rather than battery. If none of that helps, the publisher's own support channel is the right next stop, and the note you made in step nine of the routine tells you exactly what version you installed and when.

If you reach a point where you would rather stop than keep troubleshooting, that is a perfectly good outcome, and Step 5 explains how to remove everything cleanly.

The household in our worked example

Our invented household follows the routine on a Tuesday evening. The download takes longer than they expected, which is why they left it running while they did the washing up. The installer offers one additional program, which they decline without difficulty because they were expecting the offer.

The tutorial runs unevenly at the default settings, exactly as their Step 2 comparison predicted it might. They lower the graphics quality one level, then one more, and it becomes smooth. The laptop is warm and the fans are audible, so they put it on a wire rack to let air underneath.

At the end of the evening they write two lines in the same note as their spending limit: the date they installed it, and the fact that the second-lowest graphics setting is the one that works on this machine. Neither line is dramatic. Both are the kind of thing nobody can remember three months later.

Before you move on

• Choose the source deliberately: the publisher's own site or an established storefront, never a repackaged mirror.
• Read installer screens and administrator prompts instead of clicking through them.
• Set up the account properly — unique password, multi-factor authentication, no unnecessary details — before the account is worth anything.
• Use the first session to find the settings and test the machine, not to make progress.
• Write down the date, the version and the settings that worked. You will not remember them.