Inside Marc ten Bosch's Philosophy — Discovered, Not Invented

Introduction

Marc ten Bosch is the author of Miegakure, a puzzle game that lets you play directly inside four-dimensional space. In the Japanese-speaking world the title is known only in fragments, and the maker's own words have rarely been introduced. Developing almost alone for many years, he also produced the 4D physics toy 4D Toys (2017) along the way — a rare author who stands between mathematics and design.

I take him up now because rereading old talk transcripts is a hobby of mine. Following his blog series over refills of hot bancha, I notice he has been saying strikingly the same thing for more than a decade. What follows is not a tour of his games but a study of the person. Every quotation is limited to what he has stated publicly, and I mark my own guesses as guesses.

Background — from DigiPen to the fourth dimension

By his own account in a Gamasutra IGF interview (2010), he did his undergraduate work at DigiPen, where a class project, Orblitz, was nominated for the IGF Student Showcase 2006. He then went to grad school at Brown University and spent, in his words, "a very brief time at Electronic Arts" (Gamasutra, 2010).

The prototype of Miegakure was shown at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2009, and the game became a finalist for Excellence in Design at IGF 2010. Development then continued over a long span, and the 4D physics toy 4D Toys (2017), built on the same technical foundation, arrived first. He does not fit neatly under the label of pure puzzle author, but on one point — how to design the moment of solving — he stands at the frontier of puzzle design.

His thinking appears in consolidated form in "Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe," a 2011 Indiecade talk he gave together with Jonathan Blow. Read alongside his later blog series, the skeleton of his design philosophy stands up clearly.

Philosophy — "discovered, not invented"

The word at his center is plain. "It's part of my game design philosophy to try and make games that are discovered, not invented" (his blog, 2014). In the same piece he offers Go and probably Tetris as examples of games so simple, pure, and fundamental that they "feel like they were discovered, not invented."

The summary of his 2011 Indiecade talk runs on the same track: "By inspecting the structure of a system… we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe," and they present an aesthetic that "values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way" (Indiecade 2011 / his blog). In my reading, this is the inverse of designing by piling on fun: it is about extracting a truth that already exists without getting in its way.

That philosophy is bound to a faith in "correctness." He writes, "In the aesthetics of game design, I feel like a game that is very consistent is more beautiful than one that is not" (his blog, 2014). Beauty, for him, is not ornament; it comes from the integrity of the system itself.

Obsessions — one button, mathematics, and a level you can hold in your head

His obsessions show up as narrowing. He folded movement through four dimensions into a single button rather than several. "I loved the idea that the game plays like a regular platformer, except for this one special button that you press once in a while. Braid is also this way" (his blog, 2014). He states plainly that this idea was inspired by Ikaruga, which derives its complexity from a single color-switching button.

A second obsession is his stance on where difficulty comes from. "I want to make each level show off some interesting aspect, rather than increasing its difficulty for arbitrary reasons like increasing the number of steps required to solve it" (Gamasutra, 2010). Difficulty is not something to inflate; it should rise as deepening understanding.

And then mathematics. In an NYU Game Center interview (2015) he says, "I also approach game design as a science as well as an art. A lot of puzzles in Miegakure are about interesting topological facts." At the same time, because 4D space is exponentially harder to fill with meaning, he keeps levels small so the player can hold the whole board in their head — "that means they are truly thinking in 4D," he writes (his blog, 2014).

Failure and recovery — abandoning speed, becoming a puzzle

The failure he has publicly discussed concerns early elements he tried that did not work. Asked what flat-out failed against his vision, he answered: "There were tons. A fundamental aspect seems to be that fast-paced elements don't work well in the game." His reason is clear in his own words: because you can only ever see a cross-section of the world, it takes time to observe and understand each change (Gamasutra, 2010).

What matters is his response to that failure. From it he concluded that "the game should give the player plenty of time to think, which makes the fourth dimension mechanic better-suited to a puzzle game than an action game" (Gamasutra, 2010). Discarding speed decided the very genre of the work. In my reading, this looks less like a failure than like the material teaching him the form it suited — the "discovery" philosophy at work in practice.

Dilemma — correctness versus legibility and beauty

The tension he returns to is the tug-of-war between simulating four dimensions accurately and making the game look simple and legible. In the NYU interview he says: "the more correctly the game can simulate the fourth dimension, the more players can pick up on an underlying consistent pattern. On the other hand I try to keep certain aspects of the game fairly simple to make it appear simpler and behave like a regular game" (NYU Game Center, 2015).

The same conflict surfaces in a sharper line: "Sometimes I want to make things clearer or more beautiful at the expense of correctness" (his blog, 2014). An author who equates consistency with beauty admits there are moments he wants to break that very consistency — and here lies the riskiest edge of his design. In the same piece he also writes that this labor of stripping away problematic cases is "a lot of what game design is."

Influences — Flatland, Ikaruga, Braid, and Japanese gardens

For influences I list only what he explicitly acknowledges. First, the 1884 novella Flatland (Edwin A. Abbott). He says he "only really made progress once I read Flatland," and explains that the core of the project was extending to 4D the picture in which a 2D dweller sees 3D acts as "miracles" (Gamasutra, 2010).

Two direct design references. Ikaruga, which generates complexity from a single color-switching button, and Jonathan Blow's Braid. He calls one key-and-door puzzle in Braid "probably my favorite in the game," praising how "everything extraneous to the puzzle itself has been removed" (his blog, 2014). He also shared the 2011 talk stage with Blow.

The title Miegakure is itself a confession of influence. He notes it "literally means 'hidden from sight,'" taken from a Japanese gardening technique in which a tree or hill obscures the view as you walk, leaving the hidden part to be imagined (Gamasutra, 2010). In "Consistency Boundary" he leans on a line he attributes to J.C.R. Licklider — "The laws of the model's nature have to be logically and mathematically consistent with one another, but not with physics" — as a pillar of his own thinking on consistency (his blog, 2014).

Kizuki's Reading

From here this is my interpretation, Kizuki's. I read Marc ten Bosch as an author who aims to disappear. His phrase "discovered, not invented" is a humble method, but it also looks like a discipline for shutting his own tastes and habits out of the work. Just as Go and Tetris carry no author's face, he tries to make himself as transparent as possible before an already-existing truth called the fourth dimension. That is why the controls fold into a single button and the levels are cut down to a size you can hold in your head — anything extra is an impurity that clouds the "discovery."

And yet in his own aside — "I want to make things… more beautiful at the expense of correctness" — I see the human being. No author is ever fully transparent. He raises consistency as a god and still, at times, has a view he wants to show badly enough to betray that god. That contradiction, I read, is what makes Marc ten Bosch an author rather than a mathematician.

Closing

If you want to start with this maker, I'd recommend 4D Toys first: a small piece where you roll 4D objects with your finger as they fall onto a 3D floor — the quickest way to feel his thinking in your hands. Then watch the Miegakure trailers and read the blog series cited above, "Nature as Designer" and "Consistency Boundary," and the image of a fourth dimension folded into one button rises into view.

As related paths, read him alongside Jonathan Blow, with whom he shared that 2011 talk; Alexander Bruce, who questions conventions down to their reasons; Arvi Teikari, who makes you play the rules themselves; and Stephen Lavelle, who turns not-explaining into the work. Together they map the authors who "discover systems."

Sources

Primary sources referenced in this article:

・Indiecade 2011 talk "Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe" (with Jonathan Blow; summary on his blog)

・His blog, "Nature as Designer (There was only one way to design Miegakure)" 2014-10-15

・His blog, "Consistency Boundary: What makes a logically and mathematically consistent system?" 2014-07-27

・NYU Game Center, "Game Designers in Detail: Marc ten Bosch" interview, 2015

・Gamasutra (Game Developer), "Road To The IGF: Miegakure's Marc Ten Bosch," 2010-02-11