Honest question

I want to be able to read data from the screen. The information is a video game and I want to graph gold, HP, mana and stuff over time. I thought about reading the image on screen, but I have close-to-no knowledge of how to program this kind of stuff.
I know OOP, imperative, some functional, and some GUI development. What should I do to read data from another program, meta or not.

install BSD/Gentoo

>le pedophile video games

You could read the real values from memory addresses used by the game, rather than attempting to use OCR on images from video memory, which seems like more work.

niggers tongue my anus

>4
I'm a beginner. How can I read memory addresses?

>>6
Attach your program as a debugger to the running process. Then poke around a bit until you find the memory addresses you need. There is usually a pointer to the value at a fixed (or at least determinable) memory location, if the value isn't stored that way itself. If that isn't the case, then you'll need to have a way to input value into the spying program (the values in the case being HP, Mana, etc), scan the memory for values like that, manually do something in the game to change it, search for the new value in the reduced set, and so on.....

That's the simplest way. If you want to go the route you initially suggested, go talk to the compsci department at a few universities. They are always looking for research grants into machine vision and what not.

I did it once for Diablo II by scanning for color patterns. It would be much more effective to read the memory.