Its Own Reward

    At their most basic level, most video games are built around the relatively simple sequence of issuing a task and then giving a reward for completing that task. These rewards vary by game, and they can be anything from experience points or fancy magic items (in the case of RPGs) to things like concept art or side stories (in, for example, visual novels). Rewarding players for completing tasks is so deeply ingrained in gaming that most gaming platforms support some type of meta-rewards in the form of achievements or trophies players can earn by completing certain tasks in a variety of games. The Nintendo Switch is actually the only modern console to not support a universal achievement system, which makes the system feel strangely dated, at least in that regard.
    In some ways, though, this represents a philosophy embodied by one of the Switch's launch titles: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is an unusual game in a lot of ways, and it represents a significant departure from the style of the earlier Zelda games, but one of its most striking (and controversial) design choices is the way in which it intentionally avoids the sorts of extrinsic motivators around which most games are built. Breath of the Wild encourages exploration and the completion of tasks for the experience of doing so rather than for specific rewards, and where notable rewards are present they're usually either diminished by overall system mechanics or attenuated such that they feel almost separate from the tasks themselves.
    This is, I think, the biggest reason behind the game's controversial weapon durability system. Breath of the Wild has a wide variety of unusual and interesting swords, spears, bows, and so on, but these weapons are all exceptionally flimsy, and after a few minutes of use they tend to break. They also break imediately when thrown. As a result, this tempers the excitement of finding a snazzy new weapon or tool in a chest or being given one as a reward for a quest--the reward itself is temporary, and you already probably have plenty of other perfectly usable items. This keeps players from trying to complete quests specifically for these rewards, as the rewards themselves are not satisfying and are not meant to be.
    The game does have some longer-term progression, though, mostly in the form of extra heart containers and stamina wheels (which let you survive more hits and do strenuous things, like running or climbing, for longer periods of time before resting). In previous Zelda games, these sorts of things would usually be scattered across the world, and exploring or solving puzzles would yield pieces of heart containers as rewards. On a strictly pragmatic level, Breath of the Wild operates mostly the same way--completing puzzles gives items which can be redeemed for heart containers or stamina gauge extensions. Needing to go actually redeem these items, though, separates the "reward" from the "task," which creates a fair bit of psychological distance between exploration/puzzle solving and getting rewards. The buildup of hearts and stamina feels like something that happens naturally as you play the game rather than the explicit goal of the completion of the game's tasks.
    The end result of these sorts of decisions is that there is very little extrinsic motivation for players to do the things the game asks of them--and there is additionally very little direction or necessity in the game. It's actually possible for a skilled player to go straight from the tutorial to the final boss without completing any of the game's other quests. Viewed from the standard video game perspective of "I'm doing this task to get this reward," most of Breath of the Wild is completely pointless.
    This frees the player to be driven by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations. The meaninglessness of Breath of the Wild's rewards means players are able to pursue whichever quests or puzzles sound most interesting, wandering aimlessly around the map looking for anything that seems fun. Exploration and discovery becomes its own reward, and any given undertaking is done for the experience of having done it--nothing is lost from skipping something that seems uninteresting. Breath of the Wild is best categorized as a hybrid between an open-world RPG and a puzzle game, but in this respect it feels almost like a sandbox game in the vein of Minecraft. Tasks are self-directed and intrinsically motivated, and it ultimately doesn't matter what the player does or doesn't do.
    I have a few qualms with Breath of the Wild's sandboxy nature--mostly with regards to the way it devalues the game's ending and can leave players without the satisfaction of a resolute conclusion--but there's no doubt that the game provides players with an unprecedented degree of freedom to do what sounds fun and ignore the rest. Even in other open-world games, a variety of reward systems tend to somewhat undermine the freedom promised by the genre by making players feel obligated to complete the various tasks they come across. Breath of the Wild's intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation is very powerful and is, I think, a large part of the reason why many gamers reacted so strongly to the game in the early period of its release.
    Games with strict task/reward systems--especially mobile games or MMORPGs--can end up feeling somewhat like work. In playing the game, you are assigned tasks to complete and rewarded based on your performance or penalized for failure. At the point you are completing these tasks--playing sections of the game--just for the extrinsic rewards, it can be easy to feel unpleasantly like you're working rather than playing. Breath of the Wild's reward systems ensure that the game remains aggressively in the domain of play. The game never makes you do something you don't want to do, and there's little reason to do so regardless. It sparks a similar feeling to playing with blocks or other such toys as a child--an exercise in structured imagination and creativity, within a loose framework and with a variety of potential goals but with no strict requirements.
    This fits with Nintendo's self-concept as a toy company rather than a video game company. Breath of the Wild is more toy than game, and while it has both strengths and weaknesses, it executes on this concept without compromise.
    If you've watched any gameplay videos from Breath of the Wild, you've probably seen people doing some ridiculous things with the game's physics, like building catapults out of boulders or sledding down bridges. While some of this is due to the game's fairly flexible mechanics, Breath of the Wild's focus on intrinsic motivation deserves some credit here. It's easier to think creatively when motivated intrinsically rather than extrinsically. If the game were centered on the completion of specific tasks and the rewards for completing those tasks, the absurd creativity evidenced by many of the game's players would likely be far less common, as more players would be focused on completing the game rather than actually experiencing everything possible within it.
    This structure and design philosophy is not one I would want to see built into most games, but it makes Breath of the Wild highly intriguing and a joy to play.