Hi.

I'm a 30 year old guy that's spent about 7 years doing traditional AAA development as a gameplay designer.  I've been following indie games for about the same amount of time, but as a designer, uh, there aren't quite as many opportunities for self starting as there is for someone with solid programming skills.  Eventually I chucked the excuses and got started on a few projects, each of which fizzled because my team members kept having random messed up real life stuff pull them off the project, and I couldn't easily replace them at that point.  I also did some early work on that Altitude game that was posted here recently, which I'm much more proud of than any of the stuff I've done for my day job. 

I'm currently starting on an XNA project that I'm pretty excited about, but er... just keeping my fingers crossed that my artist doesn't get hit by a bus or something in the meantime. 

It's specialized and not updated a lot, but every bit of press helps, so here's one more:
http://www.fun-motion.com/

In my experience, most of the management at developers (not so much publishers, though) actually ARE quite passionate.  They just don't know much about games.  It's kind of a messed up situation... You have all these very talented people in the front lines that get pissed off at the inane design decisions that management imposes, and they're right to be upset.  A lot of time games are ruined basically because some idiot at the top ignores the team underneath him and shoehorns his own ideas in.  But the reverse is also true to some extent - a lot of creatives that are very good at what they do end up getting promoted because of those skills, but end up lacking the management / organization skills needed to run a big company.

Really, I think it's just an industry that needs to be more clear about areas of expertise, and respect the specializations of the people they hired.  If a programmer says something is a bad tech decision, listen to him.  If a designer says something won't be fun, listen to him.  And if those guys keep making bad decisions, they shouldn't be overruled, they should be FIRED.

But yeah, as everyone's pointed out, indie development requires a very different skillset.  And temperment.  I'm constantly seeing AAA devs try to start indie projects and fail, largely because they just can't wrap their head around the differences.

All else being equal, I think it's definitely better to stick with your real name.  It gives you more legitimacy with the press, with portals, with options like XBLA, and if you ever decide to get into normal big budget retail games, then it could come in handy to have all your work attached to your legal name.  It's also nice if you're like me and you're in the kind of position I'm in, where you work on games as your day job, but you're trying to break into the indie world... it keeps all your gaming-related work in one place so that it's easier to find.

Which is weird, because I'm not all that proud of some of the games I've worked on, but somehow the type of people that look at this stuff always seem to care more about quantity than quality.