I'm greatly fascinated by this kind of thing, but I have to call it "this kind of thing" because I don't even know if there are genre terms to categorize and analyze them.

They're inspired by game algorithms, but they aren't games; Conway's "Game of Life" was a misnomer. They're animated, but they aren't scripted like animations. In the real world we have someone like David C. Roy, who calls his art "kinetic sculptures".

Algorithmic motion pictures? Game simulators? Autonomous automatons?