Playing video games is monumentally boring after a short while. I just can't understand people who disappear into them.
Even the game I wrote for myself ( classicempire.com ) I rarely actually played, I'd spend my time trying to make the computer AI play better.
My day to day work as a programmer just doesn't push me mentally very hard. The kind of deep, exhaustive thinking I needed to get through difficult CS classes is unnecessary in most of my work (and the pacing is rather languid, most of the time).
Just hang out in the forums forum.dlang.org for a while and you'll get sense of what's going.
If you're ambitious, internally motivated, don't need to be micro-managed, and are a crackerjack programmer, you'll be welcome.
Shhh - need to keep us compiler devs' salaries up!
I’m not sure where the games narrative comes from. From the image on top of the article?
When every attempt at success is multiple times less likely because of those factors it's easy to get lost in games which are designed to feed that sense of achievement.