Creating an experience is all about sculpting it with good design sense. You want to offer the player tightly designed gameplay, but also allow for lots of meaningful choices, we call this agency. Most of the examples here are geared towards open world games, with a survival element, but most of it is applicable to other games too.
Expansive gameplay is wide gameplay. It's all about creating varied gameplay through varied circumstances. There should be a wide range of mechanics to interest the player. We shouldn't force the player to do all of them, rather, it's about giving them the choice. We can accomplish this by dividing the gameplay into three layers.