I was saying to someone a few months ago that there's a huge difference in perception between hobbyist games enthusiasts--people who may know a lot about games from a player's perspective, but who have little to no behind-the-scenes connections or knowledge that wasn't acquired at least second-hand--and people who are, however nominally, in the industry, who have some exposure to the process by which games are made.
One of the odd things I've come to realize lately, as I move further into the production side of the industry, is that modern video games are a bizarre confluence. On the one hand, it attracts some deeply creative people, who are eager to explore and use the medium's potential, but on the other, it's all essentially software development, which is in large part the most boring thing you have ever seen.
Games do a pretty good job of concealing the latter from the end user, since most of the development process that you'll see as a player will involve cool things like concept art, motion-capture, or modeling, but no behind-the-scenes documentary will ever show you the roomful of people who have all been writing lines of code for the last sixty hours, or the dozen bug testers who've each individually beaten the game six times in the last two weeks.
Once you have some idea of the actual process by which games are created, it affects how you're able to regard the conversation about them. I don't have a lot of patience, for example, with forum warriors who label a company as "lazy," because I'm aware of the immense amount of work, manpower, money, and time it took to get a game to the point where they can have an opinion about it. When some dork asks "how hard would it have been" to do something, I have to bite my tongue on that, because odds are pretty good that if it actually had been easy, it would've been done.
