Building a game is an excellent way of starting programming. Tons of people have started programming because they wanted to create computer games. Even me, back in 2010, had one of my first projects to write a small game when I was still in my Technician course.
In this course, we used Python to develop a slide puzzle. It was very challenging because I had to learn about the game mechanics and GUI, but I could handle the project. When I started to work with Ruby, I also built one to compare with what I did with Python.