During the Inside Times, I spent a lot of time in my small hometown. To pass the time, to cope, I played a lot of Warframe, roughly 1000 hours over the past year, in fact. That averages out to around 3 hours per day. Wow.

Warframe doesn't have much difficulty. I would characterize the gameplay as just satisfying enough, and certainly plentiful enough, to capture your attention in loop for a long while (roughly 1000 hours, apparently). When I wanted to flow through boredom and trouble without really straining, I would load up Warframe.

These past few weeks I've been staying with a friend. We play Smash together most days. Unlike Warframe, Smash has a super high skill ceiling. You could practice thousands of hours and still get wrecked (“rekt”) by a professional Smash player.

I do enjoy the skill component of Smash. However, I don't feel competitive enough about video games to go beyond “skilled for a casual player.” I don't feel intrinsically motivated enough to get good at a video game, and I don't feel extrinsically motivated since I earn more in my job than almost all professional Smash players.

My friend and I team up and go online against strangers. Once in a while we get clapped. However, with my “skilled for a casual player,” we usually do the clapping. Something so socially gratifying emerges when you're clapping random strangers online with a friend. We can't stop laughing.