Reminds me of something I remember playing with years ago, where you could draw various materials on the screen. Brick, sand, water, and then add different types of explosives. A really fun simulation all in the browser.
Here's another powder simulation, https://powdertoy.co.uk/. This one still has an active community and development team, and people have built all kinds of cool things with it like actual computers that can be programmed with assembly.
The aforementioned sandspiel is excellent, along with orb.farm (by the same author), and (shameless plug) my own entry in the genre: https://github.com/JMS55/sandbox
I always thought that it was a symbol with unfortunate connotations of time-wasting. If you want to market youself with a symbol of something which is ultimately a useless distraction, this is not a attractive branding.
The Game of Life is a fun toy, but ultimately unproductive. It does not inherently lead to anything else either; the entire field is a dead end (no matter what Stephen Wolfram says). And, what’s worse, people more or less knew this at the time, and still they let most of the best minds of a generation, as it were, be absorbed into doing nothing but the equivalent of mental navel-gazing.
Thanks, it's interesting you see it that way - but I've never seen that view common among 'hackers'.
So, I doubt that's the factor why the symbol hasn't been more widely-used, emblematically. I instead suspect mixed-feelings about anything ESR proposes, or just more generally the fact that hackers are so varied in interests/behavior that there's little need for a shared emblem. (Though, the glider appeals to a certain mindset, who have & will use it as a symbol, as when it appeared in many remembrances after John Conway's passing.)
