It's not all fun & games.

Electronic Arts (EA) is arguably the largest and most successful game developer/publisher in the industry. I would think it nearly impossible to find a hard core gamer who hasn't played at least one EA title. But apparently the company doesn't understand people when it comes to their employees and more specifically, the employees that build their games. They also don't understand that for every employee they abuse, they may also be abusing their family. (Although the rant on this link is long, it is well worth the read)
When people go above and beyond the call of duty, they deserve to be recognized and compensated. EA doesn't seem to do either.

We consider our artists to be “creative” people and our engineers to be “skilled” professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.

I think this misses the point. The problem is that the managers of the engineers and artists seem to think that mandating 12 hour days seven days a week somehow constitutes flexibility. EA's problems can be placed squarely on these managers' shoulders. There seems to me to be a disconnect between the "creative" and "skilled" and these managers who are probably more worried about meeting some ridiculous deadline than providing an environment that is compatible with creativity and skill. The managers are clearly taking advantage when they try to use wage & hour law exemptions.
I also know from my own experience that skill and creativity can diminish drastically when you start to feel the effects of prolonged pressure from what may seem to be arbitrary deadlines.