Ten years ago the video card wars were in full swing. Each generation brought amazing new advance and impressive technology.

But nVidia and ATI haven't realized that we passed the point of diminishing returns years ago. Mobility and battery life are what matter. And I know there are hardcore PC gamers out there, but there are only a handful of companies even bothering to push the high-end graphics, so you buy a $500 video card and there are exactly ZERO games that take full advantage of it. Wait a year or so, and you may find that one or two of the few high-end PC game makers decide to throw you a bone and add support. And as a bonus, you get SIGNIFICANTLY increased power consumption, and the video card addicts are just wasting resources so they can all whack-off to Shader 30.0 soft shadows on eyelashes.

It's a weird, captive, completely pointless market unless you're doing 3D rendering for a living (for movies, for commercials, for product design, etc.).

It's not that game developers don't want good writers...but they need writers who are willing to bend to all the quirks and problems of game development. Writing is easy compared to the work of creating art assets or programming. You'll find yourself having to revise and go off in different directions based on schedule restrictions and technical limitations. Your incredible plot point gets negated because it's deemed technically risky, and then you have to work around it without scrapping all the work that has been done so far.

In general, developers prefer to have decent writers who understand how games are made than to have amazing writers who have no clue.

Yeah , just like you can buy all the physics books you need and become a particle physicist.

Because there are so many jobs out there for particle physicists?

Anyway I always hear this argument trotted out by so called coders who've never had any formal training and by and large they're generally useless.

Programming takes practice. Computer science is not about programming. I would argue that 8 out of 10 computer science graduates suck just as much at programming as the spaghetti VB coders you rag on.

I didn't get into computer science to be a SCIENTIST, I got into it so I could write applications and games and make useful things for people.

You don't need a computer science degree for that. You can buy all the books you want from Amazon, you can find the answers to all your questions online, and you can write any app you want in Python or Ruby or Objective C or the language of your choice. There's no need to deal with dry courses about operating systems and so on.

And if you really want some insight into NP completeness or whatever, there are plenty of free articles to read...or buy another book.

Women want to program and do useful things with computers, but maybe they're not as interested in what amounts to computer science for its own sake?