In Michigan, the College of Creative Studies in Detroit has a 3 month summer program for several weeks where high school students can sign up for several courses, one of them includes 3D character animation and creation, though it probably focuses more on the Pixar aspect than gaming aspect (not that I care, if I can scrape up the cash, I'm totally signing up for the 3 week program to get 3 college credits in July).
There's a lot of ways to get ahead in terms of what you want to do, most of it happens in watching colleges and looking for summer programs, or teaching yourself to understand things like "C++ for Dummies" (which I most certainly DO NOT understand despite the two years I've owned my copy xD).
If I ever make a game before I make it to college, it'll be a first player remake of LION from 1995. That game was GREAT, if TREMENDOUSLY hard. The idea of positioning your pride to take out large prey was a wonderful idea, but the overworld, Pokemon-like camera setting over the characters made it incredibly hard to keep track of your prey and your pride to make it very useful at times, and thus made it very, very frustrating. I have concepts of all kinds to program the "character switch" and "synchronized hunting" tactics in that game amazing, though I have next to no clue how to program it...and I know squat about AI and setting up OGRE to begin with @_@
The most I know from what I've learned in trying to make a game from all my attempts is how basic things work, not to every detail, but at least a grasp at how certain things work and a general acceptance to model bugs (it's what I get from noticing animation flaws in games like Okami and Zelda, I guess)
