Yep, these lovely things span from Los Angeles to the heart of Tokyo...maybe. What a global variable is in Actionscript is a variable you can access from ANYWHERE in your Flash file. Once you define it as a global...
_global.variableName=value;
you can change its value ANYWHERE by simply calling it and changing the part that says "value". These are different from other variables in that others can only be used in the code window they're placed in. If you have a variable named Pinky, for instance, defined in a movie clip...
var Pinky;
you can't change it in another movie clip, button, or key frame. You can access its value using a relative path...
this._parent.randomMovieClip.Pinky (yes, you have to type the whole thing so the file knows where to look)
but you can't change its value outside the window in which it was defined, or Flash is going to treat it like an entirely different variable.
Globals make variables easier to manage if you have more than one code window, so try using them for video games, animated web sites, and what-not.
