Lots of good advice has already been given. Can't say any of it is "wrong",
but for my money a twelve year old needs "steered". It's a safe bet that
when he says "game programming" he's probably thinking
Quake/Unreal/Half-Life/etc... I might push him towards tic-tac-toe or pong.
Preferably with little or no library or engine behind the scenes. And at
that point, use the VBA environment behind Word or Excel.

-Denny
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