Video Game Quiz — 50 Questions on Games and How They Work

Tetris is built around fitting together pieces made of how many squares each?

Answer Four

The shapes are called tetrominoes, from the Greek for four, and there are exactly seven distinct ones. The game was written in the Soviet Union in 1984, and because of who owned software there, its author saw no money from it for years.

In Pac-Man, what do the power pellets let you do?

Answer Eat the ghosts for a short time

The ghosts turn blue and run. What is less known is that each ghost has its own logic: one chases you directly, one aims at where you are heading, and one only sometimes pursues at all — which is why the four of them feel like personalities rather than a swarm.

Minecraft is built out of what?

Answer A grid of blocks

The world is not stored anywhere before you walk into it: terrain is generated from a seed as you go, which is how a world can be effectively endless while the file stays small. That is also why two players with the same seed see the same landscape.

Which of these began as an arcade cabinet rather than a home release?

Answer Space Invaders

The aliens speed up as you shoot them, and that was an accident. The hardware could only draw so many objects, so fewer aliens meant a faster loop. The developers noticed, decided it improved the game, and kept it — a bug that became a design.

What makes a roguelike a roguelike?

Answer Procedurally generated runs and losing progress on death

The name comes from a 1980 game called Rogue. The genre is defined by a rule most games avoid: dying costs you the run, so every attempt is a fresh generation, and the knowledge you carry between runs is your own rather than the character's.

Super Mario Bros. was originally released on which system?

Answer The Nintendo Entertainment System

1985 in Japan, on the machine sold there as the Family Computer. Its designer had already made the arcade game that introduced the character, so the platform was building on a face people knew rather than starting cold.

What is the goal in most battle royale games?

Answer Be the last player or team standing

Everyone starts with nothing, the playable area shrinks on a timer, and the last one standing wins. The shrinking circle is the part that makes it work — without it a hundred players would simply hide.

Which genre does a game like Civilization belong to?

Answer Turn-based strategy

You take your turn and the world waits, which is what allows the scale: hundreds of turns, dozens of decisions each. Players describe losing whole nights to it, and the series has leaned into that by naming the effect itself.

In a MOBA, what are the three parallel routes usually called?

Answer Lanes

The genre grew out of a custom map for a strategy game, and the three-lane layout came from that map rather than from a design document. It survived because it produces predictable places for fights to happen.

What does an open-world game mean?

Answer You can move around a large connected space rather than through fixed levels

The defining feature is not size but continuity: you can walk from one end to the other without a loading screen dividing the world into levels. That is why the term describes structure and not scale — a small open world is still open.

Which company makes the PlayStation?

Answer Sony

The console began as a CD add-on that Sony was building for a rival's machine. That partnership collapsed in public in 1991, and Sony finished the hardware alone and released it as its own — one of the more consequential broken deals in the industry.

The Xbox is made by which company?

Answer Microsoft

It arrived in 2001, from a company with no console history, and it was built around a hard drive at a time when consoles did not have one. That decision is what made a persistent online service possible on it.

What was notable about the Game Boy's screen?

Answer It had no color and no backlight

No color and no light behind the screen, which sounds like a weakness. It also ran for around thirty hours on ordinary batteries while its color competitors lasted a few, and that plus the price is most of why it won.

What does a game controller's analogue stick provide that a d-pad does not?

Answer Direction with a degree of tilt rather than eight fixed directions

A d-pad can only say which of eight directions; a stick reports how far it is pushed as well. That extra information is what makes walking slowly possible, and it arrived with the shift to three-dimensional worlds for exactly that reason.

What does VRAM hold?

Answer Textures and other graphics data

It is the memory the graphics processor works from, holding textures, models and buffers. When it runs out the system falls back on slower memory, which usually shows up as sudden stutter rather than as a lower frame rate.

What is the practical benefit of a solid-state drive in a console?

Answer Much shorter loading times

It removes the wait, and the reason is mechanical: a spinning disk has to physically move a head to each piece of data, while a solid-state drive has nothing to move. That is also why it helps most with worlds that stream in as you travel.

What does a monitor's refresh rate describe?

Answer How many times per second the screen updates

It is how many times per second the display can show a new image, measured in hertz. It sets a ceiling: a game drawing 120 images a second on a 60 hertz screen is throwing half of them away.

Why can a high frame rate still feel unresponsive?

Answer Because input lag adds delay between the button and the screen

The number of frames is only one link in the chain. Between your finger and your eye there is the input device, the game's processing, the render queue and the display itself, and each adds delay — so a high frame rate on a slow display still feels sluggish.

What does a mouse's DPI setting affect?

Answer How far the pointer moves for a given hand movement

It sets how far the pointer travels for a given hand movement, and higher is not better. Very high settings make small aims harder because a single count of movement covers more of the screen, which is why competitive players often use lower numbers than expected.

What is a mouse's polling rate?

Answer How many times per second it reports its position

How often the mouse tells the computer where it is. A thousand times a second means a report every millisecond, and past that the returns are small — the gains from raising it are mostly in consistency rather than in speed.

What does a game publisher do that a developer usually does not?

Answer Fund, market and distribute the game

The publisher pays for the work, markets it and gets it onto shelves and stores. That funding usually comes with control over deadlines and content, which is the trade at the center of most disputes between the two roles.

What is a game engine?

Answer Reusable software that handles rendering, physics and input so each game need not rebuild them

It handles the work every game needs — drawing, physics, sound, input — so a team can build a game instead of rebuilding those. The trade-off is that an engine has opinions, and fighting them is often harder than writing the thing yourself.

What does indie usually mean in this context?

Answer A game made without a large publisher behind it

It refers to who is funding it, not how it looks or how many people made it. That is worth saying because the word has drifted toward a visual style, while games made by large teams with their own money still qualify.

What happens during a game's alpha stage?

Answer Its features are still being built and it is not yet complete

Features are still being added, so the game is incomplete rather than broken. The next stage stops adding and only fixes, and the distinction matters because a bug found in one is a normal event and in the other is a problem.

What is a patch?

Answer An update released after launch to fix or change the game

Fixes and changes shipped after release. Day-one patches are now common enough to be worth noting: the disc is manufactured weeks before launch, so development continues after the copies exist.

What does porting a game mean?

Answer Adapting it to run on a system it was not built for

Making it run on hardware it was not written for. It is rarely just recompiling — controls, memory limits and screen shapes all differ — which is why ports vary so much in quality even for the same game.

What is the difference between a remaster and a remake?

Answer A remaster improves the existing version; a remake rebuilds it from scratch

A remaster keeps the original code and improves what surrounds it. A remake builds the game again, so it can change how it plays. The words get used loosely in marketing, and the code is the only reliable way to tell them apart.

What do quality assurance testers mainly do?

Answer Find and document defects before release

The work is finding, reproducing and documenting defects so someone else can fix them — reproducing is the hard part, since a bug nobody can trigger on demand cannot be fixed. It is also the most common way into the industry and among the least secure jobs in it.

What is a game jam?

Answer An event where people make a game in a short fixed time

A fixed short window, often a weekend, with a theme announced at the start. Several commercially successful games began as jam entries, which is unusual for an event whose real purpose is to force finishing something.

What does localization cover beyond translating the text?

Answer Voice recording, formats, on-screen fit and cultural references

Recording voices, changing date and currency formats, refitting text that grew when translated, and replacing references that will not land. Text length is the practical killer: a phrase that fits in English can overflow a button in German or Spanish.

What is a hitbox?

Answer The invisible shape used to decide whether something was hit

The shape used for collision is not the shape you see. It is usually simpler, so the game can check it quickly, and fighting games deliberately make attack and body shapes differ from the art — which is why two attacks that look identical can behave differently.

What does respawn mean?

Answer Returning to play after being defeated

Returning to play after being defeated, usually at a fixed point after a fixed delay. The length of that delay is a real design lever: it is the main way a game decides how much a death should cost.

What is a speedrun?

Answer Finishing a game as fast as possible, often using unusual routes

Finishing as fast as possible, and the routes usually involve exploiting bugs the developers never intended. Communities split this into categories — with glitches, without them, all objectives — because otherwise the fastest route makes every other way of playing pointless.

What does nerf mean when a game is updated?

Answer Making something weaker to balance it

The word comes from the brand of foam toys, meaning something has been made soft and harmless. Its opposite is to buff, and both exist because a live game with many players has to keep adjusting to how people actually play.

What is a sandbox game?

Answer One that gives you tools and freedom rather than a fixed sequence of tasks

The game gives you tools and a space and does not tell you what to do with them. What separates it from an open world is the goal rather than the map: an open world can still have a fixed story, and a sandbox usually does not.

What does grinding refer to?

Answer Repeating an activity to accumulate resources or levels

Repeating an activity for resources or levels rather than for the activity itself. It is one of the few game terms that is usually a complaint, and games that require it often use it to stretch a short amount of content.

What is a cutscene?

Answer A non-interactive sequence that advances the story

A stretch you watch rather than play. They are the point where a game borrows from film, and also the most contested part of game design, since taking control away is the one thing games can do that films cannot.

In multiplayer terms, what does ping measure?

Answer The round-trip delay between your machine and the server

The round trip between your machine and the server, in milliseconds. The name comes from sonar, where a ping is a sound sent out to be listened for — the same idea of measuring distance by how long the return takes.

What is an NPC?

Answer A character controlled by the game rather than a person

Anything in the world that a person is not controlling. The term has escaped games entirely and is now used about people, which is unusual — most game jargon stays inside games.

What does couch co-op describe?

Answer Two or more people playing together on the same machine

Two or more people on one machine, usually sharing a screen. It has become rarer because splitting the screen means rendering the world twice, and because online play removed the need to be in the same room.

What is frame rate?

Answer How many images the game draws each second

How many complete images the game produces each second. Film gets away with twenty-four because a camera captures blur across each exposure, while a game draws each frame perfectly sharp — which is why a game at twenty-four looks worse than a film at the same number.

What causes screen tearing?

Answer The screen updating partway through a new frame being drawn

The display refreshes partway through receiving a new image, so the top of the screen shows one frame and the bottom shows the next. Synchronizing them fixes it and adds delay, which is the trade-off variable-refresh displays exist to avoid.

What does a physics engine handle?

Answer Movement, collisions and forces

Movement, collisions and forces — everything about how objects behave when they meet. A practical catch is that these calculations are rarely identical on two machines, which is why multiplayer games often keep physics out of anything that must match exactly.

What is a texture in 3D graphics?

Answer An image wrapped onto a surface

A flat image wrapped onto a surface, which is how a model made of a few thousand flat faces can look like brick or skin. Textures are usually the largest part of a game's file size, well ahead of the code.

What does level design mean?

Answer Shaping the spaces a player moves through and what they meet there

Shaping the space and deciding what the player meets in it and in what order. Much of it is invisible when done well — a corridor that guides you without a marker, or a room that teaches a mechanic before the game asks you to use it.

Why do many games render at a lower resolution than the screen?

Answer To keep the frame rate up, then scale the image to fit

Drawing fewer pixels is cheaper, so the game renders smaller and enlarges the result. Modern versions of this use previous frames and motion data to reconstruct the image, which is why the output can look better than a simple stretch would.

What is procedural generation?

Answer Building content with rules and randomness rather than placing everything by hand

Content built from rules and random numbers rather than placed by hand. It buys enormous quantity cheaply and costs you specificity — generated spaces tend to feel similar to each other, which is the trade every game using it has to manage.

What is an input buffer in a game?

Answer A short window where a pressed button is remembered until the game can act on it

A short window where a press is remembered even though the game cannot act on it yet, so an input made slightly early still counts. Its absence is felt rather than seen: a game without it feels unfair in a way players rarely name correctly.

Why do online games predict player movement locally?

Answer To hide the delay of messages traveling to the server and back

Your machine shows the result of your input immediately and assumes the server will agree, rather than waiting for confirmation. When the server disagrees, the game corrects — which is what you are seeing when a character snaps back to a position they already left.

What does a difficulty curve describe?

Answer How the challenge rises across a game

How the challenge rises over the course of a game. The word curve is doing work: a good one is uneven, with easier stretches after hard ones, because constant increase is exhausting rather than satisfying.