Disclaimer : I must stress that this post is written off the cuff without any verification or research. In this case I'll be making psychological assumptions which, for all I know, can be 100% wrong. Don't you EVER trust me!
I imagine most people had a moment where they discovered a cheesy strat or exploit in a game they're playing and felt amazing about it. Maybe you find an overpowered attack, a simple infinite combo, a sequence break or skip, a busted build, or whatever.
Sometimes this feeling can be the result of the exploit itself being interesting - sequence breaks certainly open up room for routing, for example. Sometimes though, the exploits obviously make the gameplay worse - less deep, less interesting, visually ugly, even kinda boring. And yet, in the short term at least, finding & using them can feel amazing. Why is that?
I think exploits best represent what I tend to call Organic Exploration.
From a psychological POV, exploration in games works in a kind of dialectic manner, similar to a mystery story. The developers, whether they know it or not, are setting up an internal logical structure that they must follow. That logical structure is then telegraphed to players who form certain expectations of how the game will work, a kind of mental model. Many players will fully "sign up" for your game's logic and try to follow along. Any inconsistencies that those players notice will be treated as flaws, similar to how inconsistencies in a good mystery story will ruin it somewhat.
But then there's another type of players who will actively look for gaps in the logic and abuse them. Those players are less like the readers of mystery stories, and more like the killers in them. To them, any gap in the logic is an opportunity which can be exploited.
It's these players that I think are the true explorers of games. They want to outsmart the game's "writer" because not only does it make them feel smart, but it gives them full ownership of their own ingame achievements. They are no longer playing around in a small constrained sandbox where every action they take already has standard response protocol.
This act of "outsmarting the creator" is what I consider organic exploration in games. This can either be exploration in the usual sense - going out of bounds, scaling sides of mountains, finding sequence skips and "unintended" routes, using tools in ways that are counterintuitive to get somewhere, etc. Or it can be combat exploration - finding OP moves, finding AI loops, breaking path finding, finding infinites, finding crazy cancels, learning how to connect moves in unusual ways, exploiting the opponent's states, etc.
In my opinion & experience, this is the only type of exploration that feels legitimate after playing games for a very long time. Nothing kills a game's exploration quicker than it playing out exactly in line with your initial mental map of the game.
This is why I think broken or kusoge style games can be so enjoyable to learn, even if they aren't fun to play. This is why I think sequence skips can be so rewarding. It's why I enjoy AI loops in say 2D beat 'em ups and Ninja Gaiden. It's why Souls exploration and its formulaic shortcuts have lost all appeal to me over the years.
The important thing is that all of this is down to player perception, so a game developer who has a keen intuitive understanding of their game's internal logic and how it's telegraphed to the player can lead the player around and surprise them constantly. Just like a great mystery writer can.
When you experience a great exploration related moment, or feel great from discovering a boring tedious cheese strat, or are having a surprising amount of fun figuring out a busted piece of shit game, ask yourself why that is. Might come to some interesting conclusions.