“There were some cool water effects,” he finally said.

“Ooh!,” Blow chimed in. “That’s the ultimate diss!”

It was when ten Bosch began explaining his current game project to me that Blow seemed most in his element. Actually, I should amend that to attempting toexplain, because in the 20 minutes that ten Bosch spent describing his game, Miegakure, pretty much everything he said slid off my brain like raindrops off Gore-Tex. Miegakure, he said, is a puzzle-based platformer that takes place in four dimensions—four spatial dimensions.

“But there aren’t four spatial dimensions,” I protested.

“Well,” ten Bosch countered, “this is what it would be like if there were.” And that was about the last thing he said that I understood for quite a while, as he and Blow chatted avidly about extruding surfaces and imagining flat planes as tubes. In Miegakure, two spatial dimensions are constant, and the player solves puzzles by swapping between the two others with the press of a button. Even as Blow and ten Bosch grew more animated and their explanations more inventive, their words continued to bounce off my forehead like so many tennis balls. Finally, ten Bosch pulled out his iPhone and loaded a sample video of Miegakure’s game-play, which featured a tiny redheaded character walking over a floating island. At the player’s cue, the fabric of the game-world suddenly warped and shifted so that the landmass seemed to be refabricating itself from the inside out. The effect was spellbinding.

“That’s the fourth dimension,” ten Bosch said.

Jaw hanging open, I looked over at Blow, who simply grinned at me.

To Blow, a project like Miegakure epitomizes what makes the video game a unique and exciting artistic medium. Just as he has worked to communicate something verbally inexpressible about the human condition in Braid and in The Witness, ten Bosch, in his game, gives players a new perspective on the world in a way that only a game can. “It’s a valuable contribution to human experience, right?,” Blow said later. “The games I like are ones that have shown me something I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, and Marc’s creating an experience that would not have been possible to have, had he not made it. And that’s pretty interesting.”

Blow is well aware that reaching for this lofty goal through The Witness may make him go broke. He’d like to see the game sell well when it’s released, potentially later this year, but his primary concern is that it fit the artistic parameters he has set for it. “I can always go back to being an independent developer,” he shrugged. “Even if I have zero dollars, I’d be able to do what I did in 2005, but better. If I can just save enough for a year or two of low-budget living, that’s all I need.” Despite his wealth, Blow still thinks like a monk.

Which, in a sense, is just what he is—a spiritual seeker, questing after truth in an as-yet-uncharted realm. These are the terms in which he sees his art. “People like us who are doing something a little different from the mainstream have each picked one direction that we strike out in into the desert, but we’re still not very far from camp,” he told me. “There’s just a huge amount of territory to explore out there—and until you have a map of that, nobody can say what games can do.”