I think it would be interesting to try transfering some of the automated search techniques to Minecraft's redstone mechanics, even though it probably doesn't fit the definition of a celular automata. Redstone is a feature in a videogame Minecraft that acts similar to logic circuits. Because building mechanics in Minecraft is inately restrictive (building is snapped to the 3d grid of "blocks", and there is only a limited number of blocks that all have predefined behaviour), there is naturally a community of people using redstones in ways that serve no purpose to the core gameplay loop, such as flying machines (think GoL's ships) [0], computers (since Minecraft's redstone is practically Turing-complete) [1] [2] or printers/autobuilders [3]. I would go so far as to say that redstone is the GoL for nerdy Zoomers.
[0] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Flying_machines
[1] https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition...
[2] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Redstone_compute...