As someone who was inspired by game development to become a programmer I must thank you. When I was in my early teen years I remember getting a bunch of programmers and artists together to try and pump out a game called "Because of War." While it never took off, I still have those assets (models, environments, music scores) and have given them to people to use in their own projects. I remember compiling my game for the first time and my OpenGL shaders being wonky but resulting in a cool effect and I ended up leaving it. Game development is truly interesting, it's 90% creativity and 10% implementation whether you're on the artist side or programmer side (Think Crash bandicoot on Playstation).

Unfortunately I lost contact with many of those friends but it helped me become what I am today. Game development is a great way to get creative minds going and link the creativity of programming to those who haven't discovered it yet.