Here’s How a 4D Video Game Works?

By Loveena Last updated Jan 30, 2023

The video game environment of designer Marc ten Bosch’s 4D adventure puzzler, Miegakure, was not built for your mind. That’s 4D: four-dimensional action in the insanely beautiful world Bosch has spent the last six years creating.

As creatures who dwell in three dimensions of space, the concept of four is especially difficult to grasp—we tend to avoid it by saying “time” and leaving it at that. If time is a dimension, then Miegakure is a 5D game because it deals with four spatial dimensions.

You are not alone if your brain hurts. Bosch’s tried-and-true explanation of four-dimensional space is mathematical. Two integers, or coordinates on a graph, represent a point in 2D space. In 3D space, a point has three numbers.

Bosch created Miegakure after imagining what a point in space represented by four integers would look like. In the video below, he explains the concept as well as the technology he’s utilizing to actualize it.

Bosch’s work on Miegakure has raised a slew of fresh issues in the artist’s mind concerning our own reality. “When designing this game, I had to take each concept and remove the parts that did not generalize to greater dimensions,” he tells The Creators Project.

If a square is a slice of a cube, then a cube is a slice of a four-dimensional item like the ones Bosch is creating for Miegakure.

What he means by “generalizing to higher dimensions” is the act of projecting each shape up one dimension. “By doing this, you get rid of elements that are peculiar to 3D, and you uncover the far more fundamental underlying notion.

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Miegakure is essentially a mathematical proof that you can run about in and explore. Perhaps this model reflects an unknown component of our own universe, or it could be as fictitious as Star Wars’ hyperdrive.

“While you could disregard all of this while playing the game,” Bosch adds in the new video, “it feels even more lovely to me when you know more about what is happening.”