Comment Re:Games are pretty much complex PROGRAMS (Score 1) 237
And that can lead to some pretty bad programming habits. There are exceptions, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're one of them.
You might not need to know the details of an internal combustion engine to make a hobby around driving a car, but you do need to understand the complexities of lift and drag and such to fly an airplane. Software's at least as technical as flight, even in many pretty simple games.
If one knows nothing of data structures, control statements, and even error handling, then one is likely to write inefficient, unresponsive, and even faulty software.
Certainly it isn't as much fun learning the technical details right away, but writing software is a technical undertaking. If one is going to skip the technical bits, then one's going to end up doing it wrong. It might become easy with practice, but it's pretty heady, technical stuff, and some people won't get it and will be driven away from it.
That said, these kids don't need to start out understanding heuristic pointer manipulation in C/C++ or inline assembly. However, they should properly learn some basics like for() and if() and how to create and handle structures or classes, like what it means to pass those as parameters. Even a simple game of rock-paper-scissors requires conditionals and input handling. If you want to make a "simple" Pacman or Asteroids or Tetris clone will require knowing where many things are on the playing field, many of which are moving, most of which will interact with each other and game controls. That's a lot of "make it up as you go" that has opportunity to learn some good data handling and coding practices along the way.
Given that Blender is in the list, the easy assumption is OP has some idea of writing a 3D game, and that's going to require some rather technical understanding, whether just for the modeling, or if including kinetic skeletal animation. Even if a library does the hard bits, some understanding of matrix-based multi-dimensional math will be required; how's that for needing some basics for ya? Blender makes that kind of easy with its game engine requiring scripting in Python.