The medium of games is incredibly inspiring to creative individuals, but is still in the throes of stigmatization, and for absolutely wrong reasons. The games industry has problems, but they're not the ones in the public lens.
Alright, so you're interested in the games industry. Here are some reasons I encourage jumping in:
This is one of the best communities I've ever been a part of. It's all the best parts of various creative fields coming together to share knowledge, geek out, encourage eachother, and work alongside one another. Big names talk to small names, and we have a lot of active game development events to meet people at.
There is always something interesting to learn, and someone who can help.
This means if you need a crash-course in anything there's usually someone who can teach you just around the corner, or on Twitter.
I was developing a ship buoyancy system for UFF one week and at a local meetup, and mentioned I was doing just that. The audio programmer I was talking to literally pointed across the room to another developer who happened to have an extensive body of knowledge concerning "ship buoyancy". You can't make this shit up. In a room of even 20 people, one of them will have answers.
Most game developers get into the field because they love games. When the industry was smaller, it was almost guaranteed.
If you are passionate about the game you're making, there isn't a better feeling than seeing it come to life piece by piece. Finding other likeminded people who share your vision, or can share their vision with you, is even better. Tapping into the passion of others is a phenomenal way to energize yourself.
It doesn't even stop at other developers. Getting someone to play your game can be terrifying, but also intensely rewarding. Watching a player 'get it' and have a mechanic click in their head can be among your favourite feelings. Seeing an emotional reaction to your game is why most of us do what we do. Chase that.
Game development tests a lot of skills, and each of them has multiple applications, and many fields associated with them.
If you're a visual artist, there's a place for you in games. Game developer and streamer William Chyr, creator of Manifold Garden, was an installation artist who wanted to avoid being 'The Balloon Guy' so he decided to relatively singlehandedly make a critically acclaimed videogame on a major release platform. You can tell he's got some visual chops just by looking at screenshots of his game. Know sprite art? Know animation? Know rigging? Know how to make 3D characters, environments, or assets? I can tell you from experience that level designers assemble environments faster than the artist can make them. It's always nice to have another artist.
If you're a musician, there's a place for you in games. Check out the amazing local artist Adrian Talens who has a lot of game music related expertise, especially in VR, and seems to be incapable of making anything which isn't charming, catchy and aesthetically appropriate. His electronic stuff is especially charged. I myself have spent my whole life as a musician, and my personal passion project, Us Forgetful Few, is being designed soundtrack-first. There are plenty of interesting design challenges relating to composing and scoring a dynamic music system.
If you're a designer, this is one of the most interesting fields to be in right now. With the advent of VR, AR, and the associated burgeoning user experience experimentation which is happening around it, you are bound to find interesting problems on a daily basis. Non-XR game design is also just intensely fascinating, and unlike developing websites and apps, you'll encounter problems which have never been encountered before, and it'll happen often. You also get opportunities to manage small teams on fun problems, and help programmers and artists communicate more effectively through you. You'll deal with spatial design, graphic design, user studies, sound design, marketability, interface design, designing for aesthetics, designing for hardware, designing for people. Lots to choose from.
If you're a software engineer, there's a place for you in games. It will probably pay less, but there's something to be said for enjoying what you do. It's easier to learn a thousand things if you enjoy what you're doing. I wouldn't have learned a single thing I wrote on this Wiki if the last 5 months weren't inspiring as all hell. It's possible I wouldn't have even made it to 5 months. I definitely wouldn't have learned much. Maybe a lot of very specific server integration stuff or something, but not huge volumes of practical knowledge.
And best of all, if things don't work out in a particular games job, you'll still have your specialization to fall back on, plus a basic knowledge of a hundred new things, and a great communty who all care about you and can give you a new opportunity or connection at the drop of a hat. We've got eachother's back.
And here are some reservations I have about the industry, which although aren't enough to keep me away, may be serious enough that it turns you off games as a career:
(Coming Soon) Games are hard to make. Often much harder to make than movies, and some tips for keeping your scope down. Additionally, lots of game studios go the route of hollywood trying to make 'safe' games - and why that doesn't work for indie devs.
(Coming Soon) Concerning a side-effect of the difficulty of making games, lots of studios underestimate the costs of developing them, but also underestimate the power of the game developer community.