Variables are the way that our C++ games store and manipulate values. If we want to know how much health the player has then we need a variable. Perhaps you want to know how many zombies are left in the current wave? That is a variable as well. If you need to remember the name of the player who got a particular high score, you guessed it, we need a variable for that. Is the game over or still playing? Yep, that's a variable too.

Variables are named identifiers to locations in memory. So we might name a variable numberOfZombies and that variable could refer to a place in the memory that stores a value representing the number of zombies that are left in the current wave.

The way that computer systems address locations in memory is complex. Programming languages use variables to give a human-friendly way to manage our data in memory.

Our brief discussion about variables implies that there must be different types of variable.