I didn't see your response Frumple, but i think we can agree that having achieved this feat, (and it's immediate surroundings) indicates both intelligence and skill.
... we couldn't agree, actually. It takes a particular skill
set, and particular
sorts of intelligence, but there's not guarantee either of those is transferable to... well, anything else but what they were used to do. I'm not in a position to know how capable the folks who did the work on the games are of repurposing those skill sets, or how complementary their particular sort of intellectual capability is with other tasks.
I
do know that a lot (if not all) of the programming skill sets related to content creation in
general isn't terribly useful when being directed at, say, database programming, or building software designed to assist with construction, research, etc. Often entirely different methodologies and theoretical bases, to say nothing about different programming languages and whatnot. I be indulging in a fair degree of folly to just assume that someone trained and capable in the former would be able to just swap to the latter at the drop of a hat... or at all.
As for the sweet spot... why not? If game programming (art and entertainment in general, really.) is what gets a person fed and keeps 'em sane and functioning so they can go out and do other things, that is what it is. It's certainly no less in line with a utopian goal than a retail job, or most industrial or desk jobs. Honestly, small scale/independent programming work (game related or otherwise) is often
more in line with that kind of goal -- at least it isn't
quite as blatantly contrary to most utopians as many consumerist enabling fields of work are and sometimes manages to produce something of notable aesthetic merit. It's a cleaner path than a lot of things, yeah.