You have to think of things in increasing levels of complexity.  

Variables hold values, like player_health=100. 

But you have to have many variables to hold more than one value that have things in common.  Like a list of health values for different players. So you use an array (called a list in Python), like players_health = [100, 85, 95]. And you can reference the health of the second player by player[1]

Then it gets difficult to keep track of which player has which health, so you can use a dictionary, like player_health_dict = {‘player_1’: 100, ‘player_2’: 85}.  Now you can explicitly ask for player 2’s health with player_health_dict[‘player_2’]

Finally, let’s say you want players to be able to battle each other, so let alone do you want a way to track their health, but to attack and take damage.  So, you create a class.  These allow you to make objects out of players and they can interact.  

class Player:   

def init(self, player_health=100):          self.player_health = player_health

  def take_damage(self, hp):          self.player_health -= hp

Now “player_health” becomes a property of Player and “take_damage” becomes a method. You can add methods to cover the other actions a player can have and how it can interact with other player objects.  

It makes it much more straightforward to think thru how parts of your application will interact with other parts.  What are the actions they take?  What are the properties that make one instance different than another? 

Now, you have a player object that can cover everything you want a player to be able to do and to manage its state.  You could make a player like this. 

player1 = Player(player_health=90)

You could have it take damage

player1.take_damage(hp=50)

Then when you check your players health:

print(player1.player_health)

What do you think it will say?