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You can meaningfully start working on a video game even if you're completely disconnected from any sort of career track or network, and can still produce something that many strangers will happily interact with if it's successful. Government is a complete nonstarter for any sort of solo work, and unless you're up for full-stack entrepreneurship on your lonesome, so is industry. Interesting work at unsolved problems also isn't exactly at the bottom of the org chart, so you'd need to maneuver some sort of illegible career-entrepreneurship maze with bottomless will to political power to get anywhere where you might get a chance to have meaningful impact anything. I don't see that many of the sorts of people who have a mindset of being good indie video game programmers wanting to get into that or thinking they would succeed at it. Sixty years ago, "try to join Bell Labs" would have been a clear path for someone who can do clever stuff but isn't terrible interested in constantly spending most of their effort in career advancement, but stable, slack-providing organizations like that are hard to keep around.
Absolutely! I could've been more clear - I don't blame game devs individually at all! I think this issue is a broader reflection of our cultural values, what we assign status to, and how difficult we make it for people to actually change things as opposed to just work as cogs in a giant system.
I hope we are able to renew some of our cultural institutions, but we'll likely need some clearing of the deadwood first.
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