I'm an aspiring game developer, while I want to excel mostly at design and art, I feel I should have a basic understanding of programming so I can make some games a reality.

A buddy of mine on the MLPforums, Ashbad. Suggested I download and install both netbeans and MinGW. Opening Netbeans it tells me I need a compiler for C++, thus where MinGW comes in. However I have no idea of making Netbeans recognize MinGW, as it doesn't automatically detect it. Any ways I can take care of that?

And please keep it really simple, I have no programming experience so I wouldn't understand the lingo.

Personally, I think your life would be easier if you just install Visual Studio Express (clearly you're using Windows). If you would prefer to use Netbeans, though, this should help:
http://netbeans.org/community/releases/60/cpp-setup-instructions.html#compilers

Visual Studio express? Sounds good. Does it require any outside programs or downloads?

Only the .NET framework, which you should already have as part of Windows. Visual Studio Express is made by Microsoft; make sure you get the C/C++ version.

taken care of, installing now. Thanks for this.

(sorry for double post)

Okay, all installed. Now where do I start? Is there any tutorials to making a program in this software I can follow?

I'm afraid I don't have any links I've personally used/learned from, but I can say that Google is quite helpful for this.

"Visual Stuido C++ first program" reveals a few nice links, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3jeozLUr8w, if you like videos. Or http://www.learncpp.com/cpp-tutorial/06-writing-your-first-program/ if you prefer a normal tutorial (Albeit a bit dated). http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh386302.aspx also appears to be a good source (Seeing as it's from Microsoft directly, found by "visual studio 2010 c++ tutorial". Hope that helps some

Nice links, _player. As you mentioned either on IRC or your Introduce Yourself post, the best way to learn good practices is to read existing code, so once you start understanding the basics, I'd definitely find yourself some simple (then increasingly more complex) bits of code to read, understand, and modify. I mention this only because it's somewhat relevant: I have a book hitting stores in less than a week that teaches programming concepts by way of graphing calculator programming; feel free to check it out, as it might help.