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Hide nothing from him for game development.
He can't have total focus on any particular aspect and be able to ship anything.
Buy this kid a new gaming-class computer every 2 years.
This investment could save you $100,000 in college tuition fees.

This may be advanced, but worth a shot: Game Theory

As far as gameplay goes, follow the mantra of Dwarf Fortress and FTL, "Losing is Fun!".
Occasionally place players in impossible situations so they can experience failure while trying their best.
A game that's too easy or too linear gets dropped quickly.

Maybe he'll pick up the art side as well and make a game before he's out of high school.
8 years is long enough for a really good game, even designed/developed solo - Uplink had 3 devs, Banished is a 1-man shop.
I started programming at age 15 - within a year of getting my 1st computer.
I could have done it earlier, but didn't have the $2000+ required in those days.

More resources
Unity 3d
Playmaker - an AI design tool using zero code.
Blender
Blender Guru
character rigging

Quick assets (some free):
CG Textures
Open Game Art
Turbo Squid

Easy scenery:
Terrain - Terragen
Plants - Speedtree

Perhaps you could develop a third-party library for video games, something that uses CPU and (optionally) GPU as well, be it physics, game AI, or graphics related. You could develop it as a hobby like before and later see how sales go.

For example, I have seen SpeedTree licensed in many games including AA+ titles, so they must make some money. A planet engine providing huge, planet-sized playgrounds would be another example. Or, if you don't want to avoid graphics altogether you could write a massive, highly portable and configurable AI library, i.e. tens of thousands of actors following complex plans in parallel.

Unless they get the price of production down, this won't help.

The problem with Hollywood is the $100 million movie. At that price point, the project needs assurances of success. This leads to sequels, remakes, and the occasional new idea by a known director. That was the trend for 2010-2011. It got out of hand, and sequels started bombing. The low point was probably when "Police Academy 8" was green-lighted.

The comic-book branded movie thing seems to be winding down. The first-tier characters have been done. The second-tier characters have been done. The third-tier characters don't have enough fans to guarantee box office success.

In SF, you have to build a world, as full sized sets, miniatures, or CGI. This costs. If you cut corners, it shows. CGI looked good at first - now you could build Big Things at last. But then you have to fill in all the detail on the Big Things. That's why CGI films list hundreds (sometimes thousands) of staff in the credits. In the Toy Story movies, you'll see long drives or chases through suburbia. Each house is different and has unique landscaping. Somewhere up in San Raphael is the poor schlub assigned to landscaping houses 1030 through 1045, in the cubicle next to the one doing houses 1046 through 1060. Procedural city generation has been tried, but still doesn't look very good. (Procedural tree and forest generation, though, does work quite well. The processes that generate real trees are local and fractal and can be modeled successfully. So far, nobody has built a good automatic architect.)

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" started out as a $20 million movie and ended up an $80 million movie for that reason.

>procedural generated
Get real, most developers are as lazy as your average fat geek sitting with a twinky.

The chance of any of them actually taking the time to learn how to do such a thing is the same chance of Earth being destroyed by an asteroid.
As sad as it is, it is just a job to a good chunk of the development industry, not a hobby and job.
Very few are as passionate about it these days.

It is a damn shame, since PS is a really great method for generating natural worlds.
Why do all the hard work when it can do it for you?

There are some packages out there that already have the hard work done for you, like Speed Tree
And wow, i never realized Fallout3 used Speed Tree.

(or at least since Strike Commander)

Sure that you mean Strike Commander? I can't remember anything procedural in that game, maybe the terrain, but other then that it was a very artwork heavy game, quite similar to what we have today. Procedural stuff such in Elite or Elite2 on the other side was extremely impressive, whole solar systems that fit onto a floppy disk, neat stuff. But that was a long time ago and color swapping an image to produce yet another planet isn't going to impress people today. The big disadvantage of real 100% procedural graphics is that they are quite heavy on the CPU if you want to make stuff look good (see Roboblitz or those 64KB demos, tiny download, but requires quite a while till they are actually ready), so I don't think they will get all that much use in mainstream games for the time being (aside from a few oddballs like Spore).

However on the positive side of things proceduralism is sneaking into the backdoor, there are already plenty of games that use procedurally generates trees for example, those are all offline generated, so they don't grow in the game itself, but its a clear indication that when it comes to things like nature procedurally generated things look already more then good enough to be used in todays AAA games. Hopefully just a matter of time till somebody has a few spare cycles on the CPU left to let the procedure stuff happen in the game itself.

All that texture/model data aside, one thing that I find a little annoying is that the gameplay itself is still so very prescripted. Games like EF2000 or XCom:UFO had a full dynamic war going back in 1995 or even before that, yet todays FPS are more often then not just a rail shooter with a little free movement thrown in, times when an enemy actually surprises or when your doing actually has consequences are few and far between. If procedural levels are to much, I'd like to at least see some procedural enemy placement and movement. But as with all good things, it might just be a matter of time, after all Battlefield Bad Company already brought destructible walls not unlixe XCom:UFO back and we had games like Assassins Creed, which did a hell of a lot stuff right, before the developers ran out of ideas and implemented one of the lamest missions systems in history.

SpeedTree already does this, and does a very nice job. Try their free downloads. SpeedTree has smooth level of detail processing, so you can draw very large forests in real time. One of their demos is a "million tree forest". Every tree is different; they're generated procedurally from a set of parameters. You can use their tree library, with about 1000 different varieties of tree, or design your own trees.

SpeedTree already does this, and does a very nice job. Try their free downloads. SpeedTree has smooth level of detail processing, so you can draw very large forests in real time. One of their demos is a "million tree forest". Every tree is different; they're generated procedurally from a set of parameters. You can use their tree library, with about 1000 different varieties of tree, or design your own trees.

There was a proprietary one (that I forget the name of now) that was very good

There was a proprietary one (that I forget the name of now) that was very good

I believe the proprietary one you are referring to is SpeedTree.

Oblivion is an RPG lite. Aside from the completely broken levelling system, and rather bland computer generated forests, it has a limited number of options and playstyles, and the world doesn't actually have that much variety contrary to the claims of its biggest fans. My recommendation for anyone who thinks Oblivion is the cat's meow is to play Baldur's Gate II -- which is arguably the best single-player RPG ever made. It doesn't look as pretty (its a decade old now, but then again, it'll probably play on your laptop), but its still one of the most engrossing RPG's ever made.

I put Oblivion down after 1 weekend. I've played Baldur's Gate all the way through about 4 times. The last time was a little over a year ago. Its still that good.

I'm sure you know, but for the benefit of everyone else the technology used in Oblivion is SpeedTree.

If artwork and technology are causing exponential development costs, developers need to work smarter.

Right now the game industry is in a transitional phase where great graphics are expected, but hard to produce. The solution is to make it easier to produce great looking games and Middleware is the key.

Middleware solutions are growing fast and have enabled spectacular feats. GTA3+, for example, runs entirely on RenderWare with a proprietary background-loading/streaming system. Rockstar took existing technology (RenderWare) and existing game play stuff (racing, 3rd person shooters, crazy-taxi, etc) and blended them together with something new and unique and CREATIVE (a vast, free roaming game world). Sure the development costs were high for the GTA3 series games, but I can bet you that had they been forced to reimplement RenderWare, there would be no GTA3 games to play today. The cost would have just been too prohibitive.

Now that Rockstar has come up with this free roaming world game play style (and people clearly enjoy it) either rockstar, or someone else, should release the technology as middle ware and poof, its now easy for people to add new innovations to that.

There needs to be more art-related middleware such as http://www.speedtree.com/ and improved tools such as ZBrush (being used for bump map creation in Unreal 3) from http://pixologic.com/home/home.shtml

A lot of time is spend reproducing work. We need to work smarter, not harder. We need public domain high resolution 3d models for common real world objects, character model generation software, facial expression engines, animation engines, tons of stuff!

There is a big itch that people need to start scratching! And you can make a lot of money doing it.