One of the biggest talking points of this year’s E3 was the reinvention of The Legend of Zelda, an iconic Nintendo franchise as old and reliable as Super Mario. The Legend of Zelda has always stuck to the simple formula of the adventure game, each incarnation undergoing a cosmetic makeover as well as various gameplay-altering tweaks. The latest chapter, titled Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, appears to have completely abandoned the traditional adventure template in favour of an open world, in which gathering food, building fires and crafting clothing is key to survival. Gameplay videos suggest something resembling real world physics, like wind blowing a fire toward a field of grass and setting it ablaze, causing an explosive chain reaction. Crafting your own armor and weapons appear to be key to success in this resource-rich world. The franchise appears to have taken a healthy dollop of inspiration from Minecraft, as well as a tonal palette straight out of Studio Ghibli. The result looks to be a peacefully pastoral world, with crumbling ruins to climb and a variety of spiky, cutesy monsters to fight. In short, it looks like a childhood fantasy made incarnate.

The HD remaster of Skyrim was also announced, another vaguely medieval world full of ancient castles, of beasts ready to be slain with magic swords and cities bustling with secrets. I played Skyrim religiously when it first came out and I believe I took more steps in that game than I have in my actual life and I didn’t even explore half of it. The thing about these huge, open worlds is that they’re pretty absorbing. I spent far more time increasing the skill set of my character than I ever have improving myself. But I didn’t choose to play the hero. I spent much of it simply wandering around, taking in the scenery, exploring abandoned ruins and randomly slaughtering innocent villagers, like a serene serial killer with a fondness for nature trails. It may sound like a colossal waste of time, and sure, it was, but it was fun. It was a game. And the nature of video games appears to be changing, evolving from restrictive, objective-based activity to creative sandbox, where the focus is on you to create your own entertainment. Minecraft, the game with as much potential as a box bursting with gloriously mismatched Lego, seems to have led this digital renaissance.

Traditionally, games offer a simple, direct route to success or failure. Collect these coins, get the key to open the door, kill the boss and complete the level. Well done, you get a gold star. Open worlds have these objectives too, but the beauty is, they’re not mandatory. The player is free to explore, to hunt and fish, to gather flowers, build a house, defend it, find a good woman perhaps, start a (virtual) family. The simplicity of the rural lifestyle is, I believe, something we all instinctively long for, without necessarily wanting to invest the effort. In real life it’s hard to assemble furniture, let alone build a house with wood you just chopped from the nearest forest.

In the digital age, everything is handed to us, having been created by somebody else. As we spend more and more of our time inside, staring at screens, it’s fun to stare at a screen which transports you back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The self-sustaining freedom satisfies a kind of nostalgia, scratching the itch to pack it all up and move to a cabin in the woods without sacrificing your Wi-Fi.

Along with the increased player freedom comes the opportunity to tell a story more natural to the medium. Often, video games take their storytelling cues from film, a mistake that leads to long, unskippable cutscenes and characters whose actions wildly differ from their established personalities. Playing Grand Theft Auto and watching the characters casually gossip while driving over bloodied pedestrians is an unsettling experience. Open games can offer a world saturated with history for the player to explore, allowing the character to be defined by their actions, or in Minecraft’s case, allowing the player to create their own story and sculpt the world in their own image.

The creative opportunities for players can only increase, as developers experiment with new ways to utilize the ever-expanding technology available to them. We have games where the player can build their own farm, their own civilization, their own city, even create their own game. Playtime is no longer the exclusive domain of children. The open world game offers all us hard-working adults an opportunity to just switch off, wander around exploring or build a castle, just to knock it down again.