Looking at Yu-Chan cheng's post about women in computer careers... many of the reasons listed struck a chord with me. Particularly "the narrow focus of the job", where women would prefer to apply CS to broader issues, and the "solitary, myopic fascination with obscure technical details." I've noticed that I feel alienated by technical discussions, of games or whatever, whenever they don't seem to have any particular effect on a broader issue that is important to me. When playing games, to me, it seems like a waste of time to get so good at something that has so little personal or social value. Don't get me wrong, I love to play games... but I don't like to have to invest a lot of effort at it. I'd be interested in the motivating factors for why some people like to spend so much time and effort on games like Doom. What do they get out of it?