I got into programming in 3rd grade because I wanted to make games. I've taken tons of computer science courses through high school and college, looked into programming books, the works. But none of that has been as educational or fun as spending a few hours a night trying to figure out how to work OpenGl works, reading other people's code and writing my own stuff. I haven't read TFA, and I'm not looking to go into the industry, but I have the feeling that the good game programmers do their jobs because they love it and they'll put in their own time to learn something - simply because they enjoy it.