> I feel sorry for today's generation of gamers, since there is a much larger wall between playing and creating these days.

Sometimes that wall isn't as high as it seems and as long as people know that, they can still break in.

For example, Minecraft (which is mentioned in another comment) has a pretty good ecosystem of mods and plugins that you can look at the raw code for, twiddle with, change, etc. I could easily see kids learning from that the same way I learned from screwing with ROM.