You continue adding to your repertoire, bit by bit, fueled by interest and passion. Like with many things in life, it's a bit like Lego - as you add more blocks of various sorts, you can build bigger and better things.

There are learning opportunities all around, if you're open to them. The variety of video games available has grown so rapidly, there's only time to play so many. The pioneers in the industry had to figure out new and novel ways to do things, as is the case in other fields. Looking at what they've done fuels the imagination - "How did they do that?!?".

Fractal landscapes, 3D navigation, more complex audio, speech synthesis, and computer graphics hitting Hollywood and the big screen.

Imagining "what's under the hood?" can be a journey. Sometimes a digital image is just an image. Sometimes, though, it's more - containing secret messages, or as a kind of storage device that a program can use in novel ways, such as creating vast landscapes from the bytes in the image, allowing some computational power to be steered in other directions.

You realize that there's so much potential in moving through the world with open eyes and an open mind, looking at things a little differently. Who knows what you might discover!