The core pursuit of any programming endeavor is the solution of problems. In that light, programming for video games is the same as programming anything else, even though it has a reputation for being hard or difficult to learn. It just has more interesting problems to solve. This talk will highlight the unique challenges to programming games: knowledge of hardware, performance and memory footprint awareness. With specific examples in C/C++, as well as some scripting languages, we will understand how game programmers have to dig a little bit deeper to not only solve problems, but do it optimally while suspending the players disbelief. Also, the role of visual languages in the development pipeline will be discussed: technologies such as WPF, XML, C#.