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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids all over the world, and we find answers. Today... Wait, hang on just one second. Good. Oh, I just... Hang on, I just got to... Powerful. Yes.

Yes. Unbelievable.

Oh, sorry, I got distracted. I finally beat the level on my phone game I've been really struggling to get past. It appears sometimes I get a little distracted by video games. And a lot of you might get distracted too. And many of you certainly enjoy video games and have been sending us a lot of questions about them.

Hello, my name is Sophie. I'm six years old. I live in Wyoming. my question is how are video games made because I really want to make ones so I want to know how

they're made. My name is Jackson and I live in Forney, Texas. I am eight years old and my question is why do people play video games? My name's Cecilia. I'm nine years old. I live in Liberty, Missouri and my question is who invented video games? We're going to tackle all those questions

and more today, and we're going to look at video games more broadly as well.

These days, video games can reflect whatever interest you have, whatever passions you have, and allows you to explore a little bit of yourself. And the people that make these video games, they want to make something that they enjoy too. That's Patrick Klepek, a writer and

editor for Crossplay. That's a newsletter focused on parenting and video games. And yes, he does get to play a lot of video games for his job but maybe not as often as you might think. I wish my

job was sitting down to play video games every day. In reality it is playing video games late at night when my kids are asleep or when I get a chance to play with them. It's a lot of talking to people who are much smarter than me about like you know why do video games scare us? Like why are why do kids love to play scary video games? Like, what is interesting about that? And then I come to you and explain, this is what the smart people said. How can I explain it in a way that you can understand too?

With Patrick's help today, we're going to start out on level one.

My name's Emerson. I am seven years old. I'm from Wichita, Kansas, and I want to know how are video games made? Hi, my name's Emily. I'm eight years old, and I live in Kaiser, Oregon. How are video games made?

My name is George, and I'm from Sunnyvale, California. How are video games made?

My name is Kai, and I'm five and a half years old, and I live in Fitchburg. How are video games made?

Hi, my name is Seamus, and I come from Live Oak, California, and I'm seven years old. How do we make video games?

It starts with the story that you tell on a playground or with your friends or to yourself. It is just an idea that somebody has. What happens after that, though, is it's great to have an idea. I want a character to go on a quest. Well, what are they going to do on that quest? Here are different things they could do. Who are the characters that they're going to meet? What are the actions they're going to take? What dangers are they going to encounter? And then you may have the idea for that story, but then all of a sudden you need friends to help you build out everything that's going to happen on that story. And maybe you're the one that's really great at coming up with the really snappy line of dialogue or the cool quest that they're going to go on or how the hero is going to save the day. But then you might need your friends who can make that appear on screen, who can draw.

those characters because we all have unique talents and interests. And the cool thing about video games is that it takes advantage of all the fancy new technology, but also the same creative interests that we get to explore on a daily basis and then puts it into the cool thing that we call a video game. It's sort of like when you're at school and you get assigned into a group and everyone has a different assignment on the project. Maybe you're a great artist. Maybe you have great ideas. Maybe you like writing words. Maybe there's somebody who's really good at math. They understand how numbers work. And so when you see a character like Mario jump across the screen, someone came up with why does he jump that high? Why does he run that fast? And someone programs a bunch of numbers into a computer that then for you become the game where you hold the A button down and I can get Mario to jump a little bit or a lot or walk slow or run fast. And those people all come together with different skills and different talents, largely built on computers to make the games that you get to play at home. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of talent. But it is the kind of thing that you can get these days. The tools are now readily available so that even as young as six, seven, eight, nine, there are ways where you can learn how to build simple video games if you ever wanted to perhaps turn that into a career yourself. You know, when I was a kid,

there were video games and more complicated video games that you could play at home were just getting started, but they didn't feel like movies. But we had a series of books that I used to like to read called Choose Your Own Adventure Books. And you could make the choice as the reader what you wanted the character to do next. And then it would tell you to go to a certain page and you'd go to that page and then the character would do the thing that you said they should do. And if you read the book again, you might make different choices and different things would happen to the characters. And there weren't as many video games like that when I was a kid. And now it really is often these video games are choose your own adventures. So you as the storyteller have to have a lot of different possibilities for what might happen depending on what the player decides is going to happen next for their character. Absolutely. And I think one of the big differences

is, you know, when you and I were growing up, video games were still figuring out what they are. Can they tell stories? Video games didn't tell stories really when they got started. It was, you're a spaceship. There are asteroids. Have you thought about blowing them up? You're Mario. There's a princess. Think about going and rescuing her. It isn't something that necessarily stirs emotion. But these days, video games tell very complicated stories that allow us to experience and engage with all of the emotional spectrum. We can be happy. We can be sad. We can make choices to be good. We can make choices to be bad. Video game stories now allow us to explore the entire sort of human condition of like how we feel on a daily basis. The stories we experience in movies and games are not that dissimilar. Like the feelings we can have in a book or something we can explore in a video game and the neat part about a video game is you get to be the participant you get to choose what that character does you can for a moment go hey i'm a good person in real life like i wonder what happens what are the consequences if i'm a bad person in this video game and it becomes a a safe place to explore different ways that we're feeling how might other people react to our actions in a way that doesn't you know necessarily really impact our friends and family if we choose to act badly in front of them. Video games had levels because video games started out in the arcade. Video games used to be something that you had to go to a store that we called the arcade. There are arcades these days, but you couldn't play video games at home and in the arcade you had to put in money like quarters or dollars in order to play them and they wanted you to lose the video game because they wanted you to give them more money and so uh if you finish level one but die at level two you have to start back at level one and that sort of basic idea of hey these video games need money in order to play which allows the people who run the arcade to make money by buying the expensive arcade machines the people who make the video games know that the person who buys the arcade machines can make money by having you play the video game and so there is sort of a sort of economic money structure of like why video games have levels and then also just like chapters in a book it allows a video game to tell a story broken up into pieces if you play a Mario game The first level might be in a desert area.

second level might be in a water area and so it allows the people who make these games like hey this is going to be the level that does this this is going to be the level that does that allows you to break that up into different teams that focus on that allows the games to change a course and change direction and try new things and if you really like hey i like this desert level i'll just stay in the desert level and i'm looking for something different today well i'll go to the water level. And so it allows games to be broken up into chapters like a book or acts in a play. And it also allows the people who make the games to break it up into different chunks that allow them to work on it in different sets of teams as they build it. So while video game levels started

in part as a way for companies to make money in an arcade type setting, they also acted like a sandbox for developers to test new ideas. Hmm. Whoever invented the video game must be really

cashing in on all of this. Hi, my name is Felix. I'm nine years old and I'm from Winnipeg, Manitoba,

Canada. And my question is, who invented video games? My name is Cohen. I am nine years old. I live in Minnesota. And my question is, who invented the first video game? Hello, and my name is Harrison

and I'm six years old and I'd like to know who invented video games and who got the idea and

how, when, and why did they do it? My name is Floyd and I'm seven years old and I'm from San Jose, California. I want to know how video games got invented. There is not one single person

who invented video games. In fact, there is not even really agreement on what the first video game was.

Uh-oh, that's Augie's question.

I'm from Lake Oswego, Oregon. I'm seven and a half years old. And my question is, what was the oldest video game?

Video games were, you know, tied to some of the earliest computer technology. And so then it becomes a question of what is a video game? When did we define that this is a video game? There are examples of a video game called Tennis for Two, which was used as a demonstration of, if you can think of table tennis with like two little paddles, like ping pong, that was showing off an early computer technology. Well, nobody could buy that. That was a public demonstration. You had to go somewhere to watch someone show you, look what this computer can do. The Tennis for Two was in 1958, which goes to show how long video games have been around. And Tennis for Two, you know, becomes this early demonstration of computer technology. But you couldn't buy it. You couldn't take it home. There was no arcade to go to. It was something you could see demonstrated in public. It wasn't until we get games like Pong, which is just another form of table tennis. Lots of early video games were grasping at what can we display on these computers that is simple, but that people will also understand. And the idea of two lines hitting a ball back and forth became one of the earliest and most common examples of what a video game could be. And then all video games kind of come forth from that, which is, well, if we could do that, what else could we put on the screen?

Hi, I'm Henry. I'm eight years old. I live in Tenterfield, Australia, and my question is, why do people create game consoles and why

are they expensive? Video games have always been expensive. Video games exist because they originally were examples of new computer technology. And so video games have always been at the forefront of demonstrating, wow, look at this new piece of technology. Look how amazing the graphics are. Look how realistic it looks. Video games started out not with reflecting a version of real life, like a lot of video games do these days, but like tiny little abstractions, like little pixels in which you have to squint. And like, I guess that looks like an asteroid. I guess that looks like a person. And I think you'll notice, like if you go to a museum and have old computers, computers used to fill a warehouse. They used to fill a building. They used to fill a room and over time like let's say you have if you have a watch a computer watch on your wrist that like lets you call your mom and dad that's a tiny little computer computers have gotten smaller and smaller and more and more powerful and what people discovered was oh the giant arcade machines we can shrink those down and we can put that in people's homes where they don't have to go to the arcade they don't have to use an arcade machine the arcade

machine can just be at home it can be on my nintendo machine it can be on my apple tv and so rather than having to go to a movie theater to watch a movie instead of having to go to an arcade to play a video game suddenly you could play a version of that arcade machine of that video game at the arcade and then maybe a year later you could play it at home just like you might watch a movie at the movie theater and then oops it's on streaming or my parents can rent it at home a couple of months later. And that's how video games eventually came in to everybody's homes. As to why they're expensive, it's because phones are expensive, tablets are expensive. These use really fancy pieces of technology. And as a result, they end up costing quite a bit of money.

Coming up, what do we do when we just want to keep playing and playing and playing and never stop? This is But Why. I'm Jane Lindholm. Today we're talking about video games with Patrick Klepek, who writes about video games and kids and parenting. We've been talking about the games themselves, but what about how we feel about video games?

Hello, my name is Aria, and I live in Oakville, Ontario. I am nine years old, and my question is, why do I like playing video games so much?

My name is Zane. I'm from Spring Hill, Kansas. my age is eight and my question is why are video games fun video games are fun in the same way

that is fun to play baseball or basketball or what do you enjoy doing the thing about video games today video games you know when we're talking about tennis for two or like ancient video games there weren't a lot of options there weren't a lot of different styles of video games lots of video games start out as trying to capture something in the real world you know like it's fun to kick a ball it's fun to to like swing my leg and like watch that ball go forward okay but it's nighttime i don't have a ball like it what if we just did that in a video game and a video game doesn't it doesn't need to be daytime out uh i can invent people to be here why are we here Actually, that ball can be a fireball. And all of a sudden, video games allow you to express yourself and to let an imagination run wild. You are not constrained by, well, recess is only half an hour. It can be as long as you want, or at least as long as your parents will let you continue playing the video game.

My name is A.M. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. And my question is, why are video games so addictive?

Hi, my name is Casey, and I'm four years old. and I live in New Wilmington, North Carolina. And my question is, why does games turn your brain into more?

Hi, I'm Isaac. I'm 7 years old. I'm from Lakewood, Colorado. My question is, why are video games addictive? My name is Adrian. I am 10 years old, and I live in Happy Valley, Oregon. My question is, why are video games so addictive?

Hi, my name is Taj. I live in Utah. My age is seven. My question is, why are video games addicted? Addictive. Addictive.

Well, it turns out like anything else, it is best experience in what one might call moderation. If you, for example, love soda and someone told you you can drink soda all day, I think at some point your stomach might feel upset. And video games work in the same way. They're fun. They're interesting. They make us feel things. But just like the endless supply of soda, at some point you have to do something else. And video games are just like anything else in your life that makes you happy. Eventually, you have to find variety in your life to do other things, to be around other people. And video games eventually hit that point as well. When you play a game like Fortnite, it's exhilarating and exciting. You can achieve victory. It's competition. Other video games allow you to explore stories and emotions. Other video games, sometimes called cozy games, are really just about building things. Like, I want to stack blocks. Minecraft, in which, like, I just want to build a world. It's not the video games turn our brains too much. It's more that we need to experience them, like everything in life, in moderation. We're like, a little bit of a video game here. A little bit of watching a movie here. A little bit of reading a book there. Video games are really no different than anything else we enjoy in life. it's most

that we can only do it for so long before our body, our brains desire something else. Our brains want to be stimulated. And as many video games as there are, as many different types of video games as they are, as many different worlds you can go to in a video game, a healthy, balanced life is one in which video games are a part of it. And it's up to us, our parents, the other people in our life to help us understand like, hey, I know we're having a good time, but I think we need to balance that out with other things.

And Patrick, in some cases, I mean, you mentioned that a lot of video game developers develop a game because they have a story they want to tell or they find this immersive world that's so cool and they want other people to be able to experience it. But there are also really big companies behind these games and they know how our brains work and they know how to make games that make you want to play more because that's good for them. And so we have to think a little bit sometimes, too, that these game developers are often putting things into the games to make us want to keep playing and not stop. And so we have to be aware of that because we're not going to want to stop and they don't want us to stop. But they know the psychology. They know how to make people want to keep playing. So there are times where it's not just a fun thing that people want you to be able to share. But there are businesses that are trying to get you to play more.

Yes. Video games don't exist unless there is someone to make money off of the video game that you are playing. And a lot these days, the video games don't actually cost you anything. You know, Roblox does not cost anything to download. But if you play a Roblox game, I'm sure you've encountered, if you've been given permission to play Roblox, immediately you will see a pop-up that says, Hey, would you like a checkpoint for 100 Robux? About a dollar? like hey would you like this cool costume for a couple of dollars and so that is how even though the game itself doesn't cost any money there is the people who make these games the one who entice you um the the phrase often used is uh FOMO fear of missing out which is like you see another player maybe it's a friend maybe it's a stranger oh they've got that cool like blue shirt on like I want that cool blue shirt well you can just walk around the corner and if your parents say yes or you have the robux in your account well you can buy that blue shirt too and so you have to remember when you play these things sometimes people make a video game and they just release it into the world because it's something they wanted to make and express themselves more often than not uh it is a combination of someone wanting to express themselves and other people wanting to make money And there's a tension between those two things, you know, in the same way that you have to buy a ticket when you go to the movie theater, that movie can't exist unless someone can make money on it. And so, and then it becomes important for ourselves to understand why these things exist. Why are they asking money from me? And also the people in our lives, like our parents, to help us like understand like, hey, I think you've had enough. I don't think we need to spend the money on this. And that is just like in real life. It's learning to understand how we spend our time, how we spend our money, and how sometimes these games, much like in real life, might be asking more of us than we actually have access to. And we have to learn our own limits. And what do we really want versus what does this thing think we want?

Patrick, if kids want to get involved in video game development, do you have any advice for them?

Yes. First, think about what are you good at? What do you like? What are you interested in? Because like anything else, you can become good at something if you spend the time and the effort. And maybe I really want to learn how to help the character like walk on the screen. I want to be the person that makes the guts of the video game work. There are so many tools these days that make it so they can turn what's called a video game programming language. It's all the ones and zeros behind the scenes that make a video game function. You can just like write sentences like this is what I want to happen. And you can drag and drop these sentences. And then the program does the work to make that appear on screen so that you can start from one part of this, which is like, I have an idea. And then the program is going to let you figure out, hey, you take this idea, you write it into words, and then it appears on screen. And if you're still interested, well, hey, hey, hey, come behind the scenes. Like, these are what these words are doing. And you can go layer by layer by layer to understand how video games are made.

Patrick says these days there are a lot of free things you can do to start exploring how video games are made.

You can start as easy as going on YouTube and looking up video game tutorials. Oftentimes in those tutorials.

videos they will link in the description here here's how these video games are made here's where you can get these tools and these are things you can get on your tablets on your computers they will run on very simple computers you don't need a flashy high-end gaming pc with all the colored lights and big fans these are things you can do on your phone on your tablet on your computer that you get at school you can start learning how to make video games and if you don't have access to any of that one simple trick that a lot of video game developers do is they look at a video game and then try and break it down on pen and paper you just get a piece of paper out and you think about what is happening in the video game if i had to explain to someone how this game works how would i write that down and just breaking it down sentence by sentence will help you better understand what the video game is what it's doing how you're interacting with it. And that's how a video game starts. A little understanding can go a long way

in how we play and think about our favorite games. And maybe Patrick's encouragement will help set you on a path to start making your own games. Thanks to Patrick Klepek for sharing his expertise with us this episode. If you want to read what he writes about video games, you and your adults can check out Crossplay online at crossplay.news. That's it for this episode. As always, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it on a smartphone. You can use an app like Voice Memos. Then have your adult email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. But Why is produced by Sarah Bake, Melody Beaudet, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Our video producer and today's episode producer is Joey Palumbo and our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. If you like our show, please think about having your adults help you give us a thumbs up or write a review on whatever platform you use to listen to us. It helps other kids and families find us and helps us keep doing this work. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then, stay curious. But Why, a podcast for curious kids, is known for serious answers to silly questions sent in by kids just like you. But did you know that But Why is now a book series? Our first book, Our Llamas Ticklish, answers questions from real kids about farm animals. This colorfully illustrated book is perfect for kids ages 8 to 10. And our second book, Do Fish Breathe Underwater, explores the underwater world of the ocean. Learn more at butwhykids.org slash books.