Novel in what way: mechanics, story, graphics? Only the last of those has real overlap with what CS academics are interested in and if you look at what gets pub

Novel in what way: mechanics, story, graphics? Only the last of those has real overlap with what CS academics are interested in and if you look at what gets published at siggraph you will see a lot of the researchers are affiliated with game studios or places like Disney or Pixar. So it's not incompatible. But for the vast majority of CS there is no real overlap with games. Plus if you've spent your career on compilers, or databases, or machine learning or whatever, you know how to build those sort of things very well, but you are going to start over basically from scratch when it comes to developing games.