I wonder how much the fidelity of modern games hinders young people from breaking into computer programming.
Games are an amazing mechanism for learning because they can cover a gamut of computing issues in an interesting and motivating environment. The key to learning how to program (or, honestly, most anything) is to have a problem you're keenly interested in and trying to solve it. The "learning" becomes secondary to the problem solving.
My Dad learned programming (badly, wow was his stuff horrible!) through solving financial analysis questions. Kids, however, tend to not have "problems". But games are filled with them, and, done right, in a quick turnaround environment, they can be really fun, and quickly rewarding, to solve.
But, Back In They Day, LOTS of games were crummy, character or text based games. So most of the problem solving was not spent on assets, but just on the logic behind the game. As a student in high school with access to a PET computer, all I did was write games. When all you have is the, albeit robust, PETSCII graphic character set and a 40x24 display, you run into limits quickly (you should have seen my first forays into 3D programming).
But at the same time, the cosmetics cost "nothing". A few characters laid out on the screen. I had a submarine game with ships traveling across "rolling waves water", that, honestly, probably took 10m of coding to make it work.
Today, however, if you look out at most any game, well, the graphics are the graphics. 2D, 3D, etc. They're very involved. Even a web page today is (can be) a time consuming process of making it "look good" beyond simply generating the content for the page.
And I just wonder if that's acting as a barrier to entry for folks even wanting to try their hand at it. This "Alphabet" game, I can see that being very quick, even for a novice to make progress on with Visual Basic. A window is trivial, painting characters is straightforward, adding colors, etc. No worries about frame rates, double buffering, animated sprites, etc. Just clear the screen and stamp a letter (or letters) on it, and watch for a keystroke.
I know there are some child friendly environments that perhaps make this easier, but for teens that want to use a "real programming language", the step up can be quite steep. When your "Star Trek" game looks much like any other, its easy to focus on game play, logic, and "learn programming". When your "Star Trek" is made from E's, K's, and *'s and The Other One is full motion 3D models blasting glittering photons, you can see how for some, that can take the wind out of their sails to even start trying.