Get a job at a game company. Many have huge turnover of coders, and are 'always' hiring. Unless you're a real superstar, they'll make you do shitty work for shitty pay for a shitty number of hours, hence are unlikely to dent your entrepreneurial aspirations like more cushy jobs have been known to.
Stash whatever crumbs they do pay you, and be on the lookout for designers that are both decent and disgruntled.
Yeah, I've already had two jr. developer jobs and I hated (and quit) them both. They were cubicle jobs. I only listed the actual ventures I tried, not the jobs.
Maybe you ought to find two co-founders...one that hacks, one that designs. If you're doing a game, you need a lot of design...all of my previous comments, and Harj's comments, about the beauty of a designer that codes or vice versa, are irrelevant when you need a LOT of great design for a long period of time. In fact, you might ought to have two good designers and two good developers. Games are a lot of work. (OK, indie developers do more and more with better libraries and such...so maybe a one or two man show can pull something great together).
BTW-YC has never, to my knowledge, funded a straight game company (Matt Maroon has a fantasy sports gaming business...but it's effectively a US-legal gambling business, which is a whole world away from pure computer gaming).
Fuzzwich is a marketing company (I can't blame you for not knowing that...I didn't until I talked to them in person...it's very subtle and way more interesting, and potentially evil, than I guessed when first seeing it).
SocialMoth. Hmmm...I guess it's kind of a game, like Truth or Dare (without the Dare). But it's more a social site.
But, nonetheless, you described a game. The sites you mention are more "fun, kinda like a game" rather than something that anyone would see and say "that's a game".
So, I repeat: YC has never funded a pure game company, to the best of my knowledge. pg has never said they wouldn't, but I've heard many conversations about games at YC events (it's one of those "fun" jobs that everybody in tech wants to do at least once...even us boring enterprise and systems developers...so people talk about building games quite frequently), and the consensus seems to be, "it's gotta be something novel and have real business potential on a small budget", which rules out a large class of games. Maybe mobile games, games tied to social networking (Scrabulous is a nice low-budget success story on Facebook), or marketing in the form of games.
Just some thoughts. Not trying to discourage you. There have been a few very big gaming success stories, and quite a lot of small team success stories in recent years. And with a great demo and presentation, the YC guys might bite.
So as of right now, your resume is "Son of a school teacher got his start designing websites. Dropped out of community college freshman year to pursue clothing venture.Failed."
Impressive. Too bad I'm already involved in a startup, otherwise I'd be down.
From poster's profile: "Son of a school teacher got his start designing websites. Dropped out of community college freshman year to pursue clothing venture.Failed, started programming with a "Get it done!" mantra.Made first million when he founded xyz game in 2007 at age 20 with partner from Ycombinator. Sold to xyz media two years later for a whopping $1.9 Billion. Devotes time to improving infrastructure in developing nations, Africa."
Seems a bit over the top for y combinator. Hackers are usually very humble people (save bill gates / larry ellison types).
Stash whatever crumbs they do pay you, and be on the lookout for designers that are both decent and disgruntled.