Chapter 1: What Makes a Game?

What Makes a Game? 🎮

Every game has a goal, rules, a challenge, and feedback.

Think about the last game you played. Maybe it was tag at recess, a board game at the kitchen table, or a video game on a tablet. Those three look very different. One needs running shoes, one needs dice, and one needs a screen. But deep down, they are more alike than you might think.

Every game is built from the same four parts. Once you can spot those parts, you will never look at a game the same way again. You will see how it works, like looking at a clock with the back taken off.

In this chapter, you will learn the four parts of every game, peek inside a video game to see how a computer runs it, meet the people who make games for a living, and get to know Scratch, the free tool you will use to build games of your own. Let’s play!

1.1 — Games Are Everywhere 🎲

Games are one of the oldest things people do. Kids in ancient Egypt played board games. Kids today play on phones. And for as long as there have been kids, there has been tag.

What makes something a game instead of just playing around? Kicking a ball across a yard is fun, but it is not a game yet. Kicking a ball into a net while someone tries to stop you is a game. Something got added. Actually, four things got added.

The Four Parts of Every Game

A goal. The goal is what you are trying to do. Cross the finish line. Score the most points. Rescue your friend from the dragon. Without a goal, you are just wandering.
rules. Rules say what you can and cannot do. In tag, you can run, but you cannot leave the playground. In chess, a knight moves in an L shape and never in a straight line. Rules make the game fair, and they make it interesting.
A challenge. The challenge is what makes reaching the goal hard. If tag had no one chasing you, you would be safe forever, and also very bored. A good challenge is hard enough to be exciting but not so hard that you give up.
feedback. Feedback is how the game tells you what just happened. A point goes up. A buzzer sounds. Your friend yells, “You’re it!” Without feedback, you would not know if you were winning or losing.

That is it. Goal, rules, challenge, feedback. Hold on to that list, because it is the motto of this whole book.

Tag, Boards, and Screens

Let’s test the list on three very different games.

Game	Goal	Rules	Challenge	Feedback
🏃 Tag	Don’t get tagged	Stay inside the lines, no tag-backs	Someone fast is chasing you	“You’re it!”
🎲 Candy Land	Reach the castle first	Draw a card, move to that color	Other players might pass you, and a picture card can send you far back	You see your piece jump ahead or fall behind
🎮 Super Mario	Reach the flag at the end of the level	Run, jump, and don’t touch enemies	Pits, moving platforms, Goombas	A coin sound, a life lost, a level cleared

Every one of them has all four parts. Tag needs no equipment at all. A board game needs cardboard and cards. A video game needs a computer. But the idea underneath is the same.

1.2 — How a Video Game Works 🖥️

In tag, your friends are the ones chasing you and calling “You’re it!” In a board game, the cards decide what happens. But in a video game, who is in charge? The computer is. And the computer follows the same simple pattern over and over.

Listen, Think, Draw

Every video game does three things, in this order:

Listen. The computer waits for input. Input is anything you do to talk to the game: pressing an arrow key, tapping the screen, wiggling a joystick, or clicking a mouse.
Think. The computer follows its instructions. If the right arrow is pressed, move the hero to the right. If the hero touches a coin, add one to the score. If the hero touches a spike, lose a life.
Draw. The computer paints a new picture on the screen showing what changed. The hero is a little farther right. The score says 6 instead of 5.

Then it goes right back to Listen. Listen, think, draw. Listen, think, draw. This loop is the heartbeat of every video game, from the tiniest phone game to the biggest game on a console.

Sprites, Backdrops, and the Stage

What is the computer drawing, exactly? Game makers break the picture into pieces.

A sprite is any character or object that can move or change. The hero is a sprite. Each enemy is a sprite. A coin, a ball, a button, and a cloud floating by can all be sprites.
The backdrop is the picture behind everything: the forest, the space station, the soccer field. It usually stays still while the sprites move in front of it.
The stage is the whole area where the game happens. Think of it like a real theater stage. The backdrop is the painted scenery, and the sprites are the actors.

When you play, it looks like one smooth moving picture. But the computer is really keeping track of each sprite separately: where it is, which way it faces, and what it should do next.

Faster Than a Blink

Here is the surprising part. The computer runs listen, think, draw about 30 to 60 times every second. You blink about once every four seconds, so between two blinks the game has already listened, thought, and drawn around 200 times.

That speed is why games feel alive. Each new picture is only a tiny bit different from the last one, like the pages of a flip book. Flip them fast enough and the hero seems to run.

1.3 — The People Who Make Games 🧑‍🎨

Someone decided that Mario should jump exactly that high. Someone drew the Goomba. Someone wrote the code that makes the coin sound play. Games do not appear by themselves. People make them, and it takes a mix of different talents.

Meet the Team

Job	What They Do	Questions They Ask
🧠 Game Designer	Decides the goal, rules, and challenge. Plans how the game feels to play.	“Is this fun? Is it fair? Is it too hard?”
🎨 Artist	Draws the sprites, backdrops, and menus. Picks the colors and the style.	“Can players see the hero clearly? Does this world look exciting?”
💻 Programmer	Writes the instructions the computer follows: the “think” part.	“What should happen when the hero touches a wall?”
🔊 Sound Maker	Creates the sound effects and the music.	“What does a jump sound like? What music makes this level feel spooky?”
🔍 Tester	Plays the game over and over to find mistakes and confusing parts.	“Did that break? Where did I get stuck?”

The designer decides what the game is. The artist and sound maker decide what it looks and sounds like. The programmer makes it actually work. The tester makes sure it works for real people. Every job matters. A beautiful game with a broken jump button is not fun. A perfectly working game with a hero you cannot see against the background is not fun either.

Big Teams and Solo Makers

Some games are made by huge teams. A big game for a console might have hundreds of people working on it for years: dozens of artists, dozens of programmers, and whole rooms full of testers. Other games are made by one person. Minecraft started as one programmer, Markus Persson, working alone in 2009. Stardew Valley was made by one person, Eric Barone, who did the design, the art, the music, and the code all by himself over about four years.

Here is the good news for you: when you build a game in Scratch, you get to be the whole team. You will be the designer when you plan the goal. You will be the artist when you draw your sprite. You will be the programmer when you snap the blocks together. You will be the sound maker when you record a “boing.” And you will be the tester every time you click the green flag to see if it works.

You do not have to be great at all five jobs. Most game makers have one favorite. As you go through this book, notice which job you like best. That is a clue about you.

1.4 — Meet Scratch 🐱

To build games, you need a tool. Ours is called Scratch, and it was made at the MIT Media Lab for kids your age. It is free, it runs in a web browser, and millions of kids around the world use it to make games, stories, and animations. You can find it at scratch.mit.edu.

Blocks That Snap Together

Most computer programs are written by typing lines of text. One missing comma and the whole thing breaks. Scratch is different. In Scratch, instructions are colorful blocks that you drag with your mouse and snap together like building bricks.

There is a block that says move 10 steps. There is a block that says when space key pressed. You stack them, and the computer follows them from top to bottom. If two blocks do not belong together, they will not snap. So you cannot make a spelling mistake in Scratch, only thinking mistakes, and those are the kind we will learn to fix.

Sprites, Scripts, and the Green Flag

Scratch uses the word sprite from section 1.2. When you open a new project, you see a stage with an orange cat sprite standing on it. You can draw your own sprite, pick one from the library, or upload a picture.

Each sprite has its own set of instructions called a script. A script is a stack of blocks that tells one sprite what to do. The cat might have a script that says: when the right arrow key is pressed, move 10 steps. An apple sprite might have a different script: when the green flag is clicked, glide to a random spot.

The green flag above the stage is the start button. When you click it, every script that begins with when green flag clicked starts running. The red stop sign next to it stops everything. Click the flag, watch what happens, fix what you don’t like, click the flag again. That is the rhythm of making games in Scratch, and this time you are the one writing the “think” part of the loop.

You Already Have What You Need

Do you need to be a math whiz to make a game? No. Do you need to draw like a professional? No. Do you need an expensive computer? No. Scratch runs on almost any laptop, Chromebook, or tablet with a browser.

What you do need, you already have. You know what makes a game fun, because you have played lots of them. You have ideas. You can think step by step, and you can notice when something goes wrong and try again. That is really all game making is.

Chapter 1 Activity: Game Detective 🔍

Your Mission: Detectives look at ordinary things and notice clues everybody else walks right past. Your job is to take three games apart and find the four parts hiding inside each one.

Part 1: The Case File

Fold a piece of paper into four columns and label them Goal, Rules, Challenge, and Feedback. Pick one playground game (like tag or four square), one board or card game, and one video game. For each game, write one or two words in every column. Was any column hard to fill in? Circle it. That is usually the part the game’s designer thought about the hardest.

Part 2: Change One Rule

Choose the playground game from your case file. With a partner or a small group, change exactly one rule. Maybe in tag, everyone has to hop on one foot. Maybe the tagger has to walk. Play it for two minutes. Then talk about it: did the new rule make the challenge harder or easier? Did the goal change? Write one sentence about what happened.

Part 3: Listen, Think, Draw

With a grown-up’s okay, open scratch.mit.edu, click Create, and find the when space key pressed block and the move 10 steps block. Snap them together and press the space bar. Now write down three things: What was the input? What did the computer think? What did it draw differently? Sketch the stage before and after.

Key Concepts Checklist

I can name the four parts of every game: goal, rules, challenge, and feedback
I can find those four parts in tag, in a board game, and in a video game
I can explain the listen, think, draw loop that every video game repeats
I know what a sprite, a backdrop, and the stage are
I know that a video game redraws the screen many times every second
I can describe the jobs of a designer, artist, programmer, sound maker, and tester
I know that Scratch is free and that its blocks snap together
I know what a script and the green flag do in Scratch