The obsession with technical things is a reflection of how divorced we have become with the natural world. As we need to attend less and less to basic needs, the mind turns inwards, and not always for the better.

I see it as a sort of computer programming equivalent of god. It's so fundamental, beautiful in its simplicity and diversity. The people doing this work are like extreme devotees.

I see it as a better Physics - current Physics as we understand it is messy, continuous, unintuitive, and contradictory. Kinda frustrating for computer science folks.

Game of Life on the other hand is so simple it can be written up in a few lines of code, and still can give rise to endless complexity.

Easy to implement, but much room for optimization.

The rules are simple, but give rise to complexity.

Despite conservation of mass and such not being a part of the rules, what appear to us to be "objects" arise, and can even exhibit velocity! Physics-lite results out of nowhere.

Finally, nerds like simulations.

Something to do with the name perhaps!

Game of Death doesn’t sound half as fun ;)