In a 2023 talk on the state of Unreal Engine, Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney describes his vision for his company’s place in the metaverse (“Epic’s Vision”). In this talk, Sweeney contextualizes the idea of the metaverse with universally rising player-bases in online games. He predicts that “that [trajectory] will put it at billions of users by the end of this decade,” “70 million” of which consisting of Epic’s most popular game (0:07; 0:58). These massively shared experiences, to Sweeney, make up the heart of the metaverse. Unreal Engine has created a new programming language named Verse in order “[support the] development of many kinds of games” in this sphere (0:33). Verse offers to make significant changes to the metaverse; however, as an emerging technology, research is particularly lacking in the ways it may affect the gameplay programming industry in the near future. Beginning to understand this problem and its preliminary effects, can be understood through the historical parallels of JavaScript.

JavaScript is a crucial element of modern web. In the foreword to the JavaScript Bible, JavaScript creator Brendan Eich says that the language was “born out of a desire to let HTML authors write scripts directly in their documents,” and was designed following four main ideas: simplified, Java-like syntax; HTML event handlers; prototype-based inheritance; and the ability to generate HTML. JavaScript also functions as a language separate from HTML, being used in 3D rendering applications and games for example (Foreword). For HTML creator Tim Berners-Lee, the web, where it and JavaScript combine, create a sort of “philosophical engineering;” simultaneously, HTML can create and represent the systems of the web. The philosophy of the web is “a vision of the world where everything is done democratically, where we have an informed electorate and accountable officials” (qtd. in Knuth 45).

 

In the modern game development space, there has been much conversation about the emergence of a “metaverse.” Epic describes this concept as a “[real-time] 3D world with persistence, discovery, moderation, and commerce” (“Real-Time Round-Up”). This characterization of the metaverse takes a more specific, commerce perspective, compared to Yüksel’s, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco, determination where they state it is a “virtual universe created on the basis of information technologies in which people interact … through their avatars” (1). The idea of a metaverse, however, was introduced long ago in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” (Arvas 65; Damar, 1; Duan et al. 153; Kalkan 164; Lee 72; Lee et al. 1; Stephenson 35-36). The emerging metaverse is being defined by games. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that “the people who actually follow the space would say [the metaverse is] about gaming” (16:08). Microsoft believes that “three categories of innovation” define the metaverse: “the consumer metaverse, the commercial metaverse, and the industrial metaverse” (Althoff 3:00; Nadella). Out of these three, Verse is currently limited to this “commercial” metaverse, concerned with “social” interaction such as “bringing avatars to life” (Althoff 3:20); it does not consider the way that developers or industries collaborate in the real world. Although there has been much speculation about the impact that Verse will have for the metaverse, current analysis hasn’t been thoroughly conducted in terms of gameplay programming.