I don't think you need to worry about that. I had played entertaining video games before I started programming, and never produced anything of similar quality.

I don't think you need to worry about that. I had played entertaining video games before I started programming, and never produced anything of similar quality. None of the games I made came anywhere close to resembling the glitz and glamor of the media or video games I loved. It's easy to look back at the 1980s and see nothing but drabness, and conclude that programming provided a competitive entertainment experience, but that's not what it was like at the time. Sometimes I'd borrow a new game disk from somebody, boot from the 5.25" floppy, and the graphics would blow me away. Nothing like the crappy graphics I could make. I wrote programs to solve math programs, generate mathematical patterns on the screen, quiz me on my schoolwork, and do simple text-based games that were already lame by the previous decade's standards. Unless you were truly exceptional, the games you wrote for yourself did not compare at all with the excitement of games you could buy for a PC or an Apple II, and even the truly exceptional kids who created entertaining video games had to be willing to slog through hours of hard, unglamorous work. Kids today who expect programming to be entertaining the same way movies and video games are entertaining will do exactly what those kids did in the eighties: turn up their nose at programming and do something else. Kids who enjoy programming will program.