Here at Gaming Mercenaries we toss out terms like “freelancer”, “contractor”, and “consultant” all as different ways of saying “temporary help”. When put like that, being a “consultant” isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds. What truly set apart “temporary help” from elite consultants are talent and positioning.

On the battlefield of game development, temporary help are the grunts, anonymous and eminently replaceable cannon fodder huddling in their trenches. The artist hired to make 200 stock textures for an expansion pack. The programmer writing some GUI layout code for a new game. The designer tasked with populating a dozen outdoor zones in an MMO by the end of the month. The writer cranking out a bunch of generic NPC dialog.

There’s nothing wrong with being a grunt — you can’t win a war without them — and at least it’s a paycheck, but grunts are typically underpaid (often getting wages marginally higher than a salaried employee, but without any benefits of employment) and often find themselves chasing project after project. Grunts are hard to differentiate from one another. Even if you’re immensely talented, if you’re hired as a grunt you’ll be doing grunt work and you’ll find the commando jobs elusive to acquire.

Commandos, on the other hand, are “that guy” (or “that girl”, as the case may be) — the names that pop to mind when you’re thinking of “if only we could get this person to help us”. These are the people that companies turn to when the shit hits the fan, when it’s crunch time, when there’s a major problem that needs to get solved right now, when they need outside advice. These are the people that are experts in their field, the cream of the crop, the ones that executives think “If I was founding a company, I’d love to do it with that person.” Commandos are the difference makers, the movers and shakers.

In other words, grunts are replaceable, commandos often are not.

In a perfect world, talent would be the sole differentiator between a grunt and a commando, but it doesn’t always work this way. In a capitalistic society your worth is determined partially by your skill, and very much by your reputation, negotiation skill, and ability to self-promote. How much better is a BMW than a Hyundai? You’d be surprised at how little the difference really is, yet BMWs command prices at multiples of a Hyundai because minor perceived differences are effective value multipliers.

So how do you go from being a grunt to a commando? First, let’s get back to that talent thing: to be an effective difference maker you need to be better than good, you need to be awesome. I don’t mean “Yeah, I’m competitive” or “I’m very good”, I mean skills that are “Holy shit!” to others in your field. Know your stuff inside and out, ditch crappy items from your portfolio, practice your craft — don’t just work at it, learn the tools outside your comfort zone, research your field avidly (books, blogs, forums, magazines). In other words, have a true passion for what you do such that it is manifestly obvious to anyone observing you in action that you’re clearly a master, not an apprentice.

If you’re an artist you should be sketching or making art or reading books and magazines about art all the time. As a designer you should be reading about game design or hacking on mods or writing design documents all the time. If you’re a programmer you should be surfing programming tutorials and writing little applications — that’s right, all the time. This is what separates the cogs that check in for 8 hours a day from the difference makers that are thinking about their work all day long.

Do you want to be a grunt or a commando? It’s not quite the slam dunk you’d expect, a lot of people prefer showing up, doing some relatively mindless work, and leaving with cash in hand. Others want a challenge and the responsibility of a project to rest on their shoulders. Commandos solve problems whereas grunts do work — which is more interesting to you?

If the commando model is what you want, then do more, learn more, get better, and start positioning yourself as a higher end option than a mere grunt. Stop being “an artist” or “a programmer”, be “the artist that’s going to make your game 10x better” or “the programmer that solves those problems you didn’t think were solvable.” Sneak behind enemy lines and take on the impossible tasks instead of sitting in the trenches ducking bullets. Be an elite gaming mercenary commando.