A development and runtime environment from Microsoft for creating and playing games on the Xbox, Windows and Windows Phone. Games are written in the C# language using Microsoft Visual Studio and XNA Game Studio, the latter including foundation templates that take the tedium out of programming various types of games (see
real-time strategy and
first-person shooter).
Games are executed under a Common Language Runtime (CLR) engine specialized for gaming (see
CLR and
.NET Framework). XNA originally stood for "Xbox New Architecture."