For me it's challenge, there arn't many other programming jobs which involve such complex realtime systems, and touch on just about every field of software engineering and computer science. And you have to deal with that as a single programmer or on a team of programmers.
To build a game requires realtime (i.e. do all these things in 16.7 ms, non-stop) graphics, input, deterministic simulation, and networking. It also touches on AI, UI, databases, algorithms (match making), systems programming, file formats (compression, fast loading, etc), procedural generation, SIMD programming (shaders), programming languages, tools development, distributed systems, assembly (in optimizing), etc. And then architecting all of those different parts to fit together.
Programming websites (full stack), enterprise software, and desktop applications all bores the shit out of me, by the time my internships were done with each of those I couldn't wait to stop doing it, even though I was offered cushy high paying salaries to stay on, I wouldn't be able to bare doing that shit day in and day out.
This. I get to think about a bunch of different problems, some of them interesting, some of them difficult or impossible to solve, with a team of malcontents and nutballs. It's like being on a crew of pirates who stress about implementing k-d trees, matchmaking, deploying dedicated servers, build systems, scaling everything appropriately and doing it all as fast as possible. And at the end you ship something which is hopefully magical, possibly something that is shit, either way you have a giant party and tell awesome stories.
To build a game requires realtime (i.e. do all these things in 16.7 ms, non-stop) graphics, input, deterministic simulation, and networking. It also touches on AI, UI, databases, algorithms (match making), systems programming, file formats (compression, fast loading, etc), procedural generation, SIMD programming (shaders), programming languages, tools development, distributed systems, assembly (in optimizing), etc. And then architecting all of those different parts to fit together.
Programming websites (full stack), enterprise software, and desktop applications all bores the shit out of me, by the time my internships were done with each of those I couldn't wait to stop doing it, even though I was offered cushy high paying salaries to stay on, I wouldn't be able to bare doing that shit day in and day out.