There were tons of people from different backgrounds, basically all there for the wrong reasons (artists to learn to program games, programmers how to program and make games etc) it's quite the endeavour to make a good game, the programming is the least of it. On top of that you need to actually be good at game design (which in my experience is the last thing people focus).
Having been on the periphery of academic CS at times I think the whole enterprise is terribly imbalanced.
A big part of the activity in social impact is in teaching the introductory CS courses which are required for many majors. PhD programs understand that their graduates have to be able to teach these classes, but few CS academics are excited about it.
Some areas get huge amounts of funding and fill up conference proceedings for decades without significant results. Other areas are funded heavily in Europe but seem almost blacklisted in the U.S. (The "Semantic Web")
I have written quite a bit of run-of-the-mill applications software for which is there is a huge need, just like for the intro CS class. For a long time I have been the quantitatively trained person who knows about data structures, algorithms, race conditions, ontologies, etc.
Lately I have been doing art side projects and have gotten very interested in the work of people like Walt Disney and Jim Henson who created imaginary worlds that people would like to inhabit. I see that study as related to game design and leading to very real gains in application software such as customer satisfaction, more revenue, lower support costs, etc.