You control a small, seemingly Japanese man who lives in a cubic landscape dotted with trees and rocks and Torii gates, the kind you see at Shinto shrines to mark, in ten Bosch's words, “the separation between the sacred and the normal.” Although Miegakure is built upon the math of four-dimensional space, the game is also infused with the ethos of Japanese gardens. Miegakure picks up these themes and extends them along a strange and previously unknowable axis.
The easiest way to wrap our minds around such a slippery concept, he thinks, is to reach out and touch it.Ģ Ten Bosch traveled to Kyoto in October to study its ancient temples for inspiration. But he wants the game to give people the intuition that a fourth spatial dimension might exist. We can't rotate objects so that they appear out of nowhere in the real world or disappear in front of our eyes. “There certainly isn't a fourth dimension in the way there is in the game,” ten Bosch says. Rather, the game attempts to evoke the experience of an actual, explorable world that includes one additional spatial dimension. Miegakure does not visualize 4-D space or analogize it to something more familiar.
If Miegakure can live up to ten Bosch's ambitions, it will be more than just another brainy diversion-it will be the realization of a century-long intellectual quest. “Games that are truly mind-expanding are very rare and very difficult to make, but this is one of them.” Miegakure has the potential to be “one of the great puzzle games of all time,” writes Jonathan Blow, a friend of ten Bosch and the designer of Braid, a game in which players manipulate time to solve puzzles. He won the “amazing game” award at IndieCade, the biggest annual showcase of independent games. 1 Ten Bosch has twice been invited to preview it at the prestigious Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The select few who have played it have showered it with praise. Chris Hecker, a friend and fellow game designer, marvels that ten Bosch “can't even see the game he's making.” Ten Bosch, who is 30, describes his daily schedule as “wake up, work on the game, go get lunch somewhere, work on the game, go to sleep.” Even after toiling for half a decade, he is still only about 75 percent done.ġ xkcd creator Randall Munroe even devoted a comic strip to Miegakure.īut among the tight-knit community of indie game developers, Miegakure is a hotly anticipated title. Building something so ambitious has consumed ten Bosch's life.
The game, essentially a series of puzzles, augments the usual arsenal of in-game movement by allowing the player's avatar, with the press of a button, to travel along the fourth spatial dimension. Mathematician Rudy Rucker wrote that he had spent 15 years trying to imagine 4-D space and been granted for his labors “perhaps 15 minutes' worth of direct vision” of it.īut for the past five years, ten Bosch has been trying to take us directly into it, in the form of a videogame called Miegakure. People have written papers, drawn diagrams, taken psychedelics, but what we really want to do is witness it. Still, most of us are no closer to fundamentally comprehending the fourth dimension than we were when Riemann first conceived it.
Cubism was in part an attempt by Picasso and others to visualize what fourth-dimensional creatures might see. Wells' Invisible Man disappeared by discovering a way to travel along it. Writers from Wilde to Proust, Dostoevsky to Conrad invoked the fourth dimension in their work. Mathematician Bernhard Riemann came up with the concept in the 19th century, and physicists, artists, and philosophers have struggled with it ever since. From this fourth dimension, we would be able to see every angle of the three-dimensional world at once, much as we three-dimensional beings can take in the entirety of a two-dimensional plane. Most of us think of time as the fourth dimension, but modern physics theorizes that there is a fourth spatial dimension as well-not width, height, or length but something else that we can't experience through our physical senses. They're all devoted to helping our brains break out of the three dimensions in which we exist, to aid our understanding of a universe that extends beyond our perception. A young-adult novel called The Boy Who Reversed Himself. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. There's a row of books on a shelf in Marc ten Bosch's living room that contains a crash course in higher dimensions.