Game

What is a Game in a Computer?

A computer game is an interactive computer program made for entertainment. There are many, many types of computer games. Some games are single-player and you can play alone. Others are multiplayer. Others are massively multiplayer. We even have zero-player games that play by themselves. Some games use realistic 3D graphics, others use 2D sprites, others are 1D text games that you can play in a terminal window. Some games have music, other's don't. Some games can be played without Internet, others require Internet. Some games are real-time action-based and require constant attention and fast movements, others are turn-based puzzles that you can just stare at for minutes without doing anything because nothing will happen until you finish your turn. Some games can be installed, others are web browser games.

Computer games are an exceedingly unique and fundamental medium. They are like text, images, or video, except they are interactive. There are many games that are essentially novels, comic books, picture books, or movies, but that you can't finish the story unless you can beat the game. We even have more artsy games that feel closer to poems instead.

All computer games, being computer programs, are nothing more than algorithms run by a CPU. There is fundamentally no difference between a computer game that runs on a PC, one that runs in a smartphone, and one that runs on a video-game console like a Nintendo, or a PlayStation, or an XBox. However, because the hardware is different, the software has to be different as well to match the hardware. So you can have a game that exists for both PlayStation and PC (it's cross-platform), but the actual files of the program are different, that is, there are two versions of the program, the PlayStation version, and the PC version.

Games can be insanely complex programs. They deal with multimedia (2D and 3D graphics, audio), have physics simulation, are Internet clients for online multiplayer, and have to interpret input coming from keyboard, mouse, and joysticks. There's a lot of low-level technical details to handle these things, which most people that just want to make a game really would rather not have to deal with. That's why game developers, whether big or small, make use of game engines, such as the Unreal Engine, or at game-development libraries, like SDL, or some other game-development product, like Unity, Game Maker, RPGMaker, Godot, etc.