In a GDC talk in 2018¹, Yoko Taro, the game designer behind the Drakengard and Nier series, gave his thoughts on what constitutes freedom in games. He made the distinction between having freedom and feeling free. The level of freedom in a game is the sheer number of different things that the player knows about and can do. It is the myriad side quests and other activities in most modern open world games, all the icons littered on the world map. However, despite the player technically having lots of freedom (i.e. choices of things to do), they do not feel free. In fact, Yoko Taro thinks that it actually causes open world fatigue, as the numerous “ordinary” things to do in the game becomes a chore. The feeling of freedom, on the other hand, comes from the sudden, unexpected expansion of what is possible. “Freedom is in a future that you did not have in the past”, Yoko Taro believes.

I think there is a lot of truth in this observation, and the most free-feeling open world games (e.g. Breath of the Wild) achieve their sense of freedom by exploiting this principle. Interestingly, along this line of thinking, the size of the world is not at all correlated with how free a game can make the player feel, since the sense of freedom comes from the expansion of possibilities. In fact, it probably helps to have a small game (in terms of the game framework, what the player can do), at least to start with, so that there is more room to expand into later. This is likely a key appeal behind the allure of finding game-breaking bugs, such as for speedruns. Some players enjoy the true feeling of freedom so much, that they look for ways to break out of the outermost intended framework of the regular game, in order to reveal even more possibilities.

The same principle extends somewhat into the real world, although I’m not sure if I’d necessarily call it freedom (but I can’t think of a better word). A person’s ordinary life is filled with freedom, yet just like in many open world games, it can often feel monotonous and unexciting. You have to go to work, to buy groceries, to cook and eat, to sleep, to hangout with friends, etc… Like quests in video games, you get the “freedom” to choose when and how to do all of this, but still they can often become chores, and the feeling of freedom is lost. Where it can be found again, is through the expansion of life into previously unknown areas.

The sense of discovery, of the ever expanding horizon of possibilities, is what drives human curiosity. Hacker culture is the same game-breaking bug finding activity generalized to all software, and all things in general. Of course there are other drivers of this culture as well, such as the sense of defiance to authority, but the chase for that feeling of freedom dominates. Perhaps this is also why I, along many other others, enjoy learning about contrarian opinions (sometimes a bit too much). It feels freeing to break out of the “designed world” of mainstream, “normal” narratives, into a realm with previously unknown possibilities. It’s an intoxicating feeling that pushes me to always seek of that “future I did not have in the past”.