Today I had a moment where I thought "What was the moment where I went from being a game maker to a game designer?" and it sort of shook me. I've been working on games for years, but it's only within the past year that I've really ever managed to make a decent full-size game, despite no lack of effort by my younger self.

And, to that matter, what was the point at which I went from being a scrabbler to being a writer? From being a responsible adult in a room with children to a teacher?

It wasn't, certainly, with my first effort.

There's a lot of things that go into becoming a professional, and they're not as immediately obvious as it may first seem, and it's not all about "hard work" either, because hard work can be wrong work.

I think there are a few things that really go into the process: studying the masters, failing boldly, and helping others.

Study the Masters

One of the first steps in getting good at something is to find people who already do it well and figure out what they do well.

If you look at how any skilled practice (i.e. profession, but also hobbies and other subjects) has developed, it has been based on previous effort.

Part of the reason we've seen so much development in technology and science in the past fifty years is because we've made it incredibly easy to discover and learn from masters in any given field.

So do it!

To become an expert, you need to have a reasonable, objective standard of what makes an expert.

To borrow from my example of going from a game maker to a game designer, the process was fairly in-depth. I spent a lot of time reading or playing games (again, I work primarily in the tabletop arena, though I've done some game programming in the past and don't necessarily care to again) to get a good feel for what a game is.

Even with this practice, I still wasn't a great game designer. What pushed me to the point where I can now, unabashedly, call myself a game designer is having my own games be published (admittedly self-published, but I'm a bit of a control freak with regards to licensing).

However, I published a game long before I called myself a game designer (actually, if you count minor titles, multiple games) and felt like I wasn't lying. I'd also designed lots of homebrew content, most of which was well-received by the communities I submitted it to. I wrote a blog about game design, and even reviewed well over a dozen games.

The step that brought me to that point was actually learning to talk like a game designer and listening in on others.

Working with Brian Feister as a (minor) contributor to Open Legend, and reading loads of materials from various places (Wizards of the Coast publishes an astonishing amount of their design practice openly, which is a great place to look even though I'm not always the greatest fan of their games), watching YouTube videos both by commentators like the Extra Credits team and by designers like Larian Studios, and going through and beginning to do a thorough breakdown and analysis of games that I had reviewed years before helped to move to that point.

So, how does that happen?

It's still got something to do with work, but it's smart, efficient work. That doesn't mean that you're not still going to do a lot of work to get good at something–you'll have to put in even more effort–but it does mean you have a goal of learning particular things from every interaction, rather than simply "studying" or "discussing" the topic at hand.

Fail Boldly

Martin Luther once (in)famously wrote "Love God and sin boldly", which was a call for Christians to remember that they were going to fail in their moral endeavors, but should nonetheless aim at a higher goal and not let their failures get in the way of an aspiration to greater faith.

To become an expert, you must love your craft, and fail boldly. You are going to have mistakes, and not everything is going to be good. But you shouldn't let failures drag you down.

This is where you need to be a bit of a stoic. Ideally you have people who can tell you whether what you're doing is good before you show it to the world, but if not you're going to have to accept that you're going to take a few hits before you get to making good things, and even then you're going to make mistakes.

When you fail, don't sweep it under the rug and cover it up. That doesn't necessarily mean that you want to double down on your mistakes.

Accepting mistakes is a middle ground between denial and defensiveness or giving up.

If, when you make a mistake, your first excuse is to defend it, you're not going to wind up improving yourself. Likewise, if you deny that you ever made a mistake–if you have a ready-made reason why everything is a "feature", not a "bug"–then you're not going to be able to learn from them either.

Giving up is also not a good option, because then you've abandoned the path to mastery entirely. This would be the equivalent to canceling a trip to Europe because you forgot your toothbrush. Life without achieving expertise is hardly life.

The secret is to learn what you value, and to try your best to act in accordance with grounded principles. Come up with an objective: "I'm going to make everything use a single dice roll without making things feel unresponsive" is what I went into Hammercalled with.

Then try doing that.

Maybe your method doesn't work as well as you'd hope. There are things in the games I've made that will always bother me, but the important thing is that I'm willing to change them if I decide that there is an alternative that better fits my values, and I'm not letting small issues get in the way of the big journey.

Solve Somebody's Problem

One of the things that helps you the most is helping other people. Now, I don't mean that you should butt in whenever anything happens. Parenting advice, for instance, is notorious for being unsolicited and incoherent, at least when compared to the greater volume of noise purporting to have mastered the subject.

However, to become an expert you must at some point pass through a series of levels, much like an apprentice in a trade; you start out as a novice where you need to get guidance from others, then you become a journeyman capable of practicing on your own, and then you become a master and you can give advice confidently and pragmatically.

At all stages of the journey, however, you can both learn from others and help others out. As a novice, you probably want to start by asking guiding questions that can be productive to others (i.e. the Socratic method), focusing on your own learning while at the same time trying to solve issues in a dialogue with others. For instance, when I help people out with something computer related, I typically do so by asking questions ("Have you done X?") because I'm usually only a Google search ahead of them.

However, when you start to hit that level of competence where you can rely on your own understanding, you want to have conversations about best practices and ideas you've had with others in such a way that you're helping to solve their issues.

And this is where the distinction between a journeyman and a master comes up. At no point can you just expect to magically become a guru sitting on a mountain giving advice to pilgrims. You need to start working to help people before you achieve mastery yourself.

There are a couple reasons for this: the first is that as a less masterful practitioner of anything you're less likely to find problems in your own work, and you're also less likely to be able to embark on the sort of ambitious projects alone that are required for mastery.

You're also going to benefit from the connections that this opens up for you both in terms of future learning opportunities and more practical present concerns.

A good example of this would be doing freelance writing gigs before setting out on your own as a writer. So long as you remember where your ultimate objective lies, this gives you a chance to practice and learn what people want and how to write before you start working on your own personal brand and set out alone.

For instance, when I was working on homebrew content for games and doing some freelancing and playtesting for other people I was honing the skills to figure out not only how to expand on a core system without breaking it (important for more ambitious games that have a lot of moving parts) but also gaining the resiliency and general technique I would need later on down the road.

Helping newcomers is also important, as it allows you to verify that you are really past that level of being a novice (if they have problems you can't solve, it should be a wake-up call), but it also allows you to help others (always a positive in my book) while building networking and connections. There's also something to be said for setting a role model, at least if, like me, you are highly driven by external feedback and encouragement.

Wrapping Up

The path to being an expert requires a lot of hard work, but simply working hard doesn't guarantee good results.

To optimize your effort, you need to be able to identify masters and build on their expertise, make mistakes and learn from them, and work with others who are both more expert and less expert than you.

If you do this, then you can identify, plan, and execute the actions required to advance your own ability, and achieve great results.