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Beehives, honey farms, spaceships, powder kegs. Beacons, toads, pinwheels, crosses. These are all elements of a strange game that tore a path through the hacking community in the early 1970s: LIFE, also known as Conway's Game of Life. John Conway is a British mathematician, and Life is a cellular automata - a spreadsheet, in essence, in which cells populate and depopulate depending on criteria such as the state of the cells that surround them. Time passes, shapes emerge through simple interactions. It all starts to look rather organic. It's been called a zero-player game.Conway's Game of Life is fascinating to mess around with. You plug in a starting shape and see what happens. Most often, your shape shifts and warps and inverts a few times and then starts to decay: most dribble away to nothing after a few generations. For years, according to the brilliant write-up in Steven Levy's Hackers, the holy grail of Lifers was something called a "glider gun". This was a starting formation that would create gliders, or patterns that "would move across the screen, periodically reverting to the same shape." Conway offered $50 to the inventor - or discoverer? - of the first glider gun, but even without that incentive people needed little encouragement to spend their time rooting around in Life. Some sort of fell into it and spent decades sounding out its depths, only to emerge, blinking, into a world that no longer valued tie-dyes quite so highly. Some never emerged at all.
All of which, I think, makes the case that the zero-player game was never really a zero-player game. Now it definitely isn't, anyway. Automata Empire popped up on Steam the other day, and it turns Conway's Game of Life into a sort of RTS in which you, well, do what you generally do in an RTS: build your forces and crush the enemy. You try to, anyway. Life often intervenes.
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