I graduated in 2003 with my BSCS. I have 11 years experience as a server administrator. When I graduated, I took another sys admin job but I'm bored. I have done some vbscript, C# professionally. But the extent of my duties is mostly Exchange and Active Directory administration. I'm 33 and I'm wondering if I'm too old to make a career change. I really enjoy playing games and I'd love to make games. I enjoy programming but all of my C++ programming has been purely in academic environments. I've been going through books on OpenGL and DirectX but is that enough? If I submit a resume to a game company, will it even get considered or will it get pigeonholed because of the system administrator jobs? I realize I'll probably have to take an entry level job and I'm okay with that. I just don't know how to communicate that in my resume.

the game companies i interviewed at were looking for:

1) STRONG c++ skills
2) interest in games, or whatever the company was creating

by that i mean, if your c++/programming skills are good, then i think they might give you a shot as long as you had an interest in game development. A lot of companies have mush of the low level graphics code already written, so you would probably be doing other programming tasks besides making things appear on the screen ;)