 One of the more fascinating things to do in Tears of the Kingdom is observe what others do with its systems, whether it be constructing towering mechs to lay waste to enemies, or elaborate torture devices for the universally hated Koroks. The systems in Tears of the Kingdom enable player expression. Ultra Hand allows you to grab and attach objects to one another, a bevy of components with different physics mediated systems, and other abilities like Fuse enables players to craft new weapons, recall to reverse time, and ascend to move through vertical geometry. Let's say sandbox in a world of boundless freedom. Of course the design of the game builds on Breath of the Wild systems not just in its world, but design philosophy. Everything from the original's chemistry engine that links all of the elements of the world together, to the idea of emergent, multiplicative design apply here, and perhaps is even more pronounced. After the opening tutorial area, players are once more allowed to explore the world of their leisure, rekindling the promise of Breath of the Wild. Except, Tears feels boundlessly free despite having the same map as the original. Yes, there are the sky islands and the depths below, but the main map feels nowhere near as novel or as interesting to explore. Yet, the game still feels expressive. Why? Well maybe freedom can be classified in different ways. Breath of the Wild had a freedom that derived from exploration and venturing into the unknown. Tears has a freedom instead that predominantly derives from player expression, not just in what to do and where to go, but how we do it. So there are three kinds of freedom, where to go, what to do, how to play. Tears may not feel as novel as Breath of the Wild in its exploration, but its systems enable freedom in the ways you can build contraptions and solve puzzles. The fact that this all works on the Nintendo Switch is also a miracle in itself. The physics simulation here is genuinely impressive. There are innumerable clips of player ingenuity, and of course puzzles in the game don't need to be solved in any one way. To prompt players to be creative, the game situates objects and elements in specific locations. Right after the shrine that teaches you how to attach a hook to a board to create a transport device, you find similar objects. When you reach the top of the tutorial area, there is a set of wings. The game is daring us to be creative through its environmental design. In this way, Tears sits on the bridge, so to speak, of different design philosophies, a divide between puzzles and problems, between a dominant solution or a sandbox of possibilities, of designer-directed intent, or player-driven exploration. Both possibilities exist. One can simply follow the main quest and think of a designer-mediated solution to a problem, but alternatives do exist as well. The paradox of course is this emergent systems-driven design to enable players' expression is governed by individual components that combine with each other. In academic frameworks, the conceptual assistance design, resources and sinks, and converters and resource economies, can be configured for player experimentation. Another paradox is how freedom itself is not unbounded choice, but when the choices we have are meaningful, interesting, fulfill our basic needs, freedom can be manufactured, at least the illusion of it. Creativity is hard to design for, for a very obvious reason. Games have victory conditions, and so there is always a correct solution, so to speak. Everything seems more destructive to creativity than to say there is a right way. Some games get around this, obviously by avoiding victory conditions, but others design it deliberately. Like Chikari, which has a painting mechanic at its core, but allows expressive range in its solutions, and also gives you the ability to just paint the world how you see fit. The other problem, however, is just giving people a blank canvas can also be intimidating. Sure there are games with infinitely expressive tools, but that's not what we are talking about here. One solution is to necessitate creativity as an optimal solution. Another is to do what the Zachtronics games do, which is to create a system where multiple solutions are built into the design. A game like Spacecam was designed to have multiple solutions from the outset, and the designers play tests to make sure that these are viable. What designing for expression needs are prompts to facilitate creativity, with tools that are themselves easy to use in multiple ways. There is a literature on this, constraints enable creativity, as do prompts in free form environments, but only when the player is in an environment where that expression has tangible effects. Elden Ring is heralded for its enabling of player expression. You can travel in multiple directions in the lands between, choose between multiple bills, whether melee or magic, and each of these design goals has many intricacies to consider. For example, in order for it to feel like players are driving their exploration, focal points in the environment, enemies, landmarks. These need to guide players through the world. The very first time we enter Limgrave, multiple points of interest are revealed, a castle in the background, a large enemy, a place to rest, an NPC, a forest. The architecture of the world built around the aesthetics of curiosity, to conjure a sense of player freedom. This has consequences for balance as well. If players can go anywhere, how does one balance the game to still feel conventionally challenging? Players now have more expression and freedom with regards to how hard or easy they want to make the game for themselves as well. With many decrying that this harms the authorship of the game. Player directed balance is a double-edged sword. You can farm souls and cheese opponents with summons and find shortcuts. This is now part of a game built around the idea of expression. Not that these weren't present in previous Souls games. And so mechanics like the difficulty customization of Celeste's assist mode, where you can change individual variables, these are also forms of expression. Players being able to configure not just themselves, but the world around them. How much freedom should be given to the player? Is there such a thing as too much? And can this in fact undermine expression? The character creator mode in Street Fighter 6 might suggest yes. Its versatility leading to abominations the likes of which are darkest nightmares couldn't even conjure. Let's instead look at the mechanics of Street Fighter 6, which are both expressive, but also tightly defined. The game has a central mechanic called Drivemeat, the green bar under the health bar, which starts out full every round. Instead of needing to fill it up, you are given more freedom from the start. The meter allows you to do 5 different things. Traditional special moves, but also a drive impact, an armor move that eats 2 hits and then crumples the opponent for a combo. Drive rush, which allows you to cancel from moves and do it in neutral to extend combos or start pressure, as it improves your frames and mobility. The drive reversal, which gets people off you, and finally the parry, which allows you to deflect attacks. These mechanics are not isolated, they play into one another. Drive impact can be reacted to with another drive impact, or can be used to respond to drive rush pressure. The parry can be used to absorb jump-ins or fireballs, but it can also be thrown for extra damage, or canceled into a drive rush. Each of the mechanics has options but also counterplay. These system mechanics apply to all characters, and so Street Fighter 6 universalizes a set of mechanics, yet somehow feels very expressive, because the systems were designed to feed off one another to enable expressive play. Now of course, Street Fighter 6 has conventional character expression through archetypes and ways of playing a character in different ways, but these systems build on top of it. Player freedom can extend beyond designer intention out. In Tears of the Kingdom there is something called recall launch, reversing time and then using the momentum to launch a link. In the essay The Glitch Art of Tears of the Kingdom, the author poses the question as to whether this was known to be possible or a player discovery. Is the game being broken, or is this an expression of its possibility space? Speedrunners will tell us that this is the gamer exploiting the code, finding inventive ways of circumventing the intent of the designers, except is this not simply an extension of the developer's multiplicative design? This is the paradox of player expression as a design philosophy. Are you forcing them to be free, or are they freeing themselves by force? To answer this we could ask the question, can a game be designed for speedrunners? We could use the example of Neon White, which tries to gamify this process. It's a first-person platforming game where you can pick up cards. These cards can be used as weapons or be discarded for a movement ability, like a double jump, dash or ground pump. However, there is a mechanic called Insight that tries to layer in incentives for optimizing times. If you get a bronze medal, you unlock a leaderboard to compare your times. If you get a gold medal, you are shown a level hint to effectively take a shortcut through a level. The shortcuts are designed from the start, but obscured, layered in when the player is ready to see them. This expands further as you unlock a ghost, global leaderboards, and even developer times. So the game gamifies the process of speedrun, but what makes the game speedrunnable are the mechanics. They combine the way Tears of the Kingdoms does, or Street Fighter 6 does. The risk reward of the movement abilities, making a choice between discarding and using a card, advanced movement tech, or navigating around the clearly laid out path before you. These are the design affordances of a speedrunning game. Also, quick restarts, short levels, responsive controls, and ultimately, an infinite skill sealer. So we have a fourth kind of freedom that builds in the three we found before. The freedom of players to effectively make their own games on top of the one that exists, to metagame. The final way this applies is when gamers take the game itself and mod it to create new levels and content, or even make games of their own. Level editors go back as far as loadrunner in 1983, and the game engine which started with the creation of Doom, giving tools to the players at the onset. The line between the two can become blurry though, like with the game Dreams, which was an extremely robust game editor or a slightly undercooked game engine depending on how you look at it. However, it can also be seen as an ultimate canvas for creativity that blends these two strands, despite not being commercially successful. In any case, beyond fully featured game engines like Unity and Unreal, games that enable creation within their rules are some of the most popular games that exist. Minecraft, a world of integrated systems linked together that enable elaborate constructions on top of dynamic exploratory play. Roblox, an ecosystem for user content and games, where players can play together across experiences conjured by the community itself. And of course, Fortnite, that not only has building integrated into its mechanics, but now integrates with Unreal Engine itself. Part of what makes this expression accessible is these tools are nowhere near as difficult to use as an actual game engine. Players given the freedom to play their own way has led to creativity for the medium as well. Mods, of course, have in the past led to new genres, like the MOBA coming from Dota, a mod of Warcraft 3. And with Doom, we saw how open source led to the predominance of a genre with innumerable clones. Doom likes. Game designers enabling the freedom not just to play games the way they want, but to invent them. Tears of the Kingdom still has active threads on forums and social media, people inventing new things, torture devices, solutions to problems. The world is still expansive and dynamic, intimidating in how massive it can be compared to its predecessor. The freedom it affords feels paradoxically curated, though. A playground with defined limits that feels both finite and infinite. That, I suspect, is the true beauty of its design. Not just that it works at all, but how its rules, mechanics, systems and even restrictions are instrumental in the creation of player expression.