Are video game programmers looked down upon by other kinds of programmers?

Having never worked on a modern game, but having been a programmer my whole career:

On the plus side, I'm impressed by the technical chops of the folks who can design optimized lighting systems, physics engines, and keep the whole things modeling and working within their frame rate budgets. That's impressive.

On the minus side, it's a bit depressing how much of a "cheat" game programming often is -- how game AI is really a series of dumbed-down decision trees and hacks, how models are faked and simplified to keep up with frame rates, etc. You get the impression that there is this wonderfully sophisticated model going on when I think in most cases it is very phony and shallow. Also, I feel a bit sad when I think of so much engineering talent going into developing... well, games. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy games, but I'll always be a "casual gamer" -- that is, a "serious person," where I think of the coolest games, designed for "serious gamers" as, basically, enormous time sinks and money pits that prey on people without enough meaningful things to do.

Looked down on? not really. They are given an appropriate amount of crap over their big egos, and lack of engineering discipline. Game development gives one a great tool set that is valued by other software engineering segments.