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About three years ago, you had your first game of Resident Evil IV. You were nine years old. Then you were sucked in, along with all your friends, by World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero III. Now you are twelve, and you got so involved in the gaming scene that you're always one step ahead of everyone else. You might be waiting for Iron Man like all the rest, but you also have the original version of NBA Jam running on your MAME emulator; you perform tricks others don't, you have mastered the language of MMORPGs, and you know how text-based adventure games used to look.

Of course, you want to program video games when you grow up: it just sounds like the perfect job, getting paid to do what you like best. Your parents will like it, too: it certainly is a good way to start a potentially fruitful career in the IT sector, and it is not incompatible with formal higher education. Quite the contrary.

So, what do you need? First of all, let's tackle general skills.

1. Learn to think like a computer does. When you throw a ball to the ground, you instinctively know how high and in which direction it will bounce. You don't particularly think about how the angle or strenght of the impact factor in, nor do you stop to consider whether you are on grass or on concrete. In other words, you implicitly take into account a number of variables and functions which a computer cannot know about until you tell it. As a programmer, you will need to write code that specifies the rules governing every movement and every action of your characters, in interaction with each other and with the environment.

One easy way to check whether you're able to look at situations from a machine's viewpoint comes from the MIT, in the form of a little software called StarLogo - The New Generation, available for free here: http://education.mit.edu/starl ogo-tng/. With an intuitive interface that does not require any previous experience, it allows the user to construct characters and have them perform any number of interesting and suitably complex actions in a virtual world. It makes for a gentle and fun introduction to the concepts of programming; there's even a gaming curriculum available online. You'll be surprised at what you can achieve with relatively little effort.

On top of that, download mainstream programming manuals such as "How to think like a computer scientist"; try to fortify your practical knowledge with a bit of theory. Aim for general IT culture: install two or three different operating systems,

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