Maybe the struggles or refusal to learn routine programming concepts is coming from being unable to find any books or examples that are relevant to his interests. I haven't read any books specifically focused on game programming, but there should be a few out there that will explain why an certain algorithm or programming pattern is useful for one part of the game, and towards the end, mend all the pieces together.

Do you have any other interests besides making video games? (I'm sure you do.) Make basic programs revolving around those interests. If you're really into music, make a simple quiz game about music trivia. Later on, as you familiarize yourself with other programming libraries, try to read a couple of mp3 files from a folder and output the list, organized by title or artist.

I know had trouble learning OOP at first when given examples of how a Poodle class can inherit from a Dog class or that Unicorn is an example of polymorphism with a Bird and Horse. Give me concrete examples that can be scalable for real world purposes instead. Taking a Computer Science class with Java finally got it to click with me.

So in developing your skills as a programmer, you will have to learn how to build small parts before you can put them together to make something larger than its sum. Or put differently, learn why shuffling numbers and variables around is important towards being able to abstract them into more complex things and ideas that represent a program.