Game of Life

People are asking me these days: What is the "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself in the entire story of our pioneer filmmaking project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play—it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series'. So in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor, and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role, and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into a real short movie, and after a little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious.


In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor and I proudly present a science fiction short film based on "Game of Life", a cellular automaton game invented by John Horton Conway in 1970. Actually, this is the first episode in the potential series we called "Flares and Fireflies". We hope you will enjoy watching it at least as much as we enjoyed making it, and—this is important—please keep in mind that we are not really educated filmmakers or talented actors and that this is pretty much the maximum what we could do with all of our knowledge and modest technology we used, to say the least. If you like it, after the movie, later in the post, is the story of how and where we made it, the entire script, some blooper stories, and behind-the-scenes photos.

First of all, I hope you like our film, and for further understanding, what I would say about the core of its script is that it tells a story about a young boy who's following a glitch in the system, presented in real life as a firefly, through numerous portals to the place where he meets a man with the final orb, the artifact that seems to be a way in for full understanding of the life itself, its origin, and the rules it is built on. Just like in Conway's simple two-dimensional game, life itself could be the same—just a set of rules in some artificial zero-player game that, on a quantum or molecular level, provides results of interactions of main ingredients.

That was about the "Sci" part of the "Sci-Fi" genre. The fiction that follows the story is in the fact that life might be fully artificial in origin. In other words, the film explores the rules of evolution that are not intended to be seen or understood by everyone. Even those chosen to dive into the game by random case or by complex rule outcome are not able to understand the principles at once. If you are asking now how the game of life really looks from the inside and behind white-green wireframes, well, you will have to wait for another episode. But is there going to be another episode? The honest answer is that I don't know. I really don't. So far we only have ideas, and from there to the final file is a long way. We'll see.

This long way with the first episode started with the script. Believe it or not, the first draft and the final scenario were not too different. It slightly changed, but only because of technological restrictions and improvisations. Ever wonder what a script looks like for short films like this one? Here it is in full:

01. Wakeup 1 - Strange sound? Nothing. Going back to sleep.
02. Wakeup 2 - Light appears. Goes through the door.
03. Getting out of bed, following light.
04. Following light upstairs.
05. At the balcony. Light and mild explosion. Artifact on the table.
06. Examining the artifact. First portal appears.
07. Light goes into abandoned house.
08. Appearing in abandoned country house.
09. Following light.
10. Second artifact. Goes through second portal.
11. Ending in the sea. Getting out on the beach. Stealing dry clothes.
12. Wandering dirt road.
13. Entering lighthouse site. Following light.
14. No artifacts here. Watching the lighthouse.
15. Seeing multiple flashes on the horizon over the site.
16. Site reappears in white wireframe only. People too.
17. Standing up in wireframe.
18. Checking a man who's reading Kindle.
19. Looking wireframe hands.
20. Kindle man: 'Everything is white. Isn't it?'

21. Looking at the Kindle man again. Everything back to normal.
22. 'Did you see it too?'
23. 'No. But I saw it once before. Different lighthouse though.'
24. 'Where? When?'
25. 'Long ago... When I was about your age...'
26. 'But... What does it mean?'
27. 'I beleive it is a game. Not everyone can see it.'
28. 'What kind of game?'
29. 'I never found out really.'
30. Reaching for the backpack. Taking out the final artifact.
31. 'But maybe you will. I think this belongs to you now.'
32. Taking the artifact. It starts glowing.
33. Going back to beach.
34. Going back to abandoned house.
35. Going back to balcony.
36. Wakeup 3 - Realizing it was a dream. Going back to sleep.
37. Sleeping. Zooming hand. Hand is going wireframe.
38. Back to normal. Light on the hand.
39. Light goes to the clock table.
40. Artifact appears.

In the end, "Game of Life" is composed out of 50 scenes filmed on four major locations. Two of them are Viktor's room and our living room, decorated with green screens for the occasion. The adventure starts and ends in the main character's room, and the only dialog is filmed in front of a green background and merged with the coastal background we took in Greece. Unfortunately, technologically speaking, this is the weakest chain in the movie, and not only because of our lack of efforts. "Chroma key" software within Adobe's "After Effects" didn't cope too well with the modest laptop I have used to run it through. It failed and crashed too often during rendering, and it got the last nerves out of me. If you add to all the struggles that the consumer dSLR (Nikon D5200) we used to film is not perfect for audio capture without an external microphone and the fact that we had to record audio separately, I have to say that I am not really satisfied with the dialog scene, but in the end I'd like to think that this is the best I could do with editing that part of the film.

However, this film would not be possible without a lighthouse, as it plays a major role in the story, and we found it just 20 kilometers from our hotel during our summer's vacation. It was located some 30 kilometers away from the famous Greek city of Corinth, built on a rock at the end of a small headland with tremendous views to the entire Corinthian gulf. We spent three days on the site and nearby beach and finished all the 'Greek' scenes and enjoyed amazing time on local beaches and restaurants. In the above photo, Viktor, with our 'nerf' portal stone preps, is posing in front of 'Faros Melagavi', not far away from the 'Vouliagmenis' lake where we filmed the last portal scene, and also just next to the ancient archaeological site of 'Heraion of Perachora' - a sanctuary occupied by a real oracle, just like the one in Delphi, dedicated to the goddess Hera and built in the 9th century BC by some Corinthian ancient cult. Here, just next to the old ruins of the temple of Hera, I found a stone perfect for the background of the green screen dialog scene. Before we went to Greece, I 'scouted' the entire site with Google Maps and photos people took and posted in Google's gallery, and all I have to say is that it looked perfect for filming, just like I hoped for. Very little improvisation was needed for 'running' and 'firefly' scenes. The same was with filming the 'portal' scene on the beautiful sandy beach of Vouliagmenis Lake, which is actually a lagoon connected to the Corinthian gulf and Ionian Sea with a narrow strait.

Finally, the fourth location we used to film intermediate portal scenes belongs to our special place—a village in eastern Serbia where we spent many vacations and weekends in the past. The name of the village is Guševac, and I mentioned it before on the blog on numerous occasions. With its intact mountain spirit, it was our first choice. The very first scene was actually filmed here in the abandoned barn. I intended to use nearby forests for additional scenes for the second portal, but due to the complexity, I gave up on that idea. It would be visually great, but it is not really that connected to the main story.

If you ask me what I liked the most behind and before the scenes of "Game of Life", without a doubt I say it was the entire adventure of making it. It started as a father-son summer play and in the end, this is what it really is: endless fun of filming scenes, creating scripts, directing the plot, improvising the story and scenes, and enjoying all the bloopers and laughter on all 'sets', especially in Greece. I really can't say what was funnier to do. Even the editing was a special time with learning all new stuff and knowledge, and in a way I am now looking at movies and TV shows with different eyes and capturing all the perfect and imperfect flow of scenes with my new 'director' habit. A small regret and disappointment was the equipment. I know I am not a perfect director and cameraman, but I am more than positive that with at least a little better technology, including software and rendering computers, the final movie would be much better. At least it would mask or hide most of our imperfections and flaws.

One thing is for sure though: if you are thinking of filming your own short movie with a modest consumer camera and not so obeying a tripod, don't think twice; go for it, and however the result is non-ideal in the end, I guarantee you that the feeling will be just perfect.

Revelation of Life (Game of Life sequel):
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/revelation-of-life-part-one.html

Game of Life graphic novel:
https://www.mpj.one/2017/03/gol-graphic-novel.html

Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Game_of_Life
http://www.mpj.one/2015/12/is-life-zero-player-game.html
http://www.mpj.one/2016/08/cyclops-of-peloponnese.html

What is Intelligent Life?

I remember reading an article in the Guardian last year with the title "Our galaxy may contain billions of planets with the same mass as Earth". Surely, it is a valid scientific guess as it is, but if it is really true, my first thought would be that intelligent life as we know it (assuming we are intelligent species) is as rare as we can imagine. If they are not, the big question is: why are we still not able to detect any single proof of their existence or are they still not eaten by some violent alien species? The only logical answer that we are first one walks on the edge of impossibility to me. Most likely we are missing something important—a discovery as important as fire was.

While this statement is still accurate and generally speaking plausible, let's think a little more about it. So to start with the original statement, are there really that many planets with Earth-like properties in our galaxy? Ever since I read the Drake equation for the first time (shown above), I couldn't get rid of the feeling that nothing spectacular I could conclude from it. Come on, really, this is just another scientific speculation at best, as we simply don't have any valuable information about star systems other than our own. Not until the recent year did we have any observations of local star clusters related to potential planets. The only scientific data coming in this regard is the one from the Kepler mission, and after two and a half years, it still didn't find a single hint of an Earth-like planet. Yes, this is just the beginning, and Kepler spacecraft only searches for changes in brightness of the nearby stars looking for planets, but still there is nothing so far. Just giant Jupiter-size or super massive rocky planets. I wanted to sound optimistically, but I would expect at least one stable candidate in these 2.5 years of Kepler's. Maybe it is there in scientific data still waiting to be revealed, or maybe those giant planets harbor Pandora's like satellites? Or nothing's there? Future will tell.

Next, there is a common interpretation that life-supporting planets exist in large numbers, but intelligent life is rare, or we are by some rare possibility the first one. As this sounds plausible on first glance, it is not. We simply have this one-time experience with Earth where one single cell needed almost one billion years to evolve and almost three billions for the first multicellular creatures to arrive, not to mention that the first plant evolved only half a billion years ago. So, a life-supporting planet or satellite requires many billions of years of evolution, not many times interrupted with cataclysmic events. If we take this for granted, then it seems that complex life, as we are, needs a small amount of time, astronomically speaking, compared to less complex ones like trees or grass. Therefore, again astronomically speaking, if we find a greenish environment on some planet, the chances to find intelligent life on that planet in some sort of statistical existence are pretty big.

Ok, what's next? Oh yes, intelligent life... Is that what we are? Are these Hawking famous sayings right? "Primitive life is very common, and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth". If you ask me, it is only half right. I'd say if primitive life is common, then complex life could be common as well, but the second statement is pretty much accurate. I don't want to sound pathetically, semi-scientifically, or too philosophically here, but there is a simple fact that what differs humans from animals is that big rational brain of ours. On the other end, what is pretty much similar to animal life is that still hyperactive emotional or reptilian part of our inner head. I am not sure what the next centuries will bring to us, but it will be either further development of the rational brain at the expense of the emotional one or the vice versa.

I am not saying that we must completely suppress emotions like Vulcans or try to augment people to reach this goal, but I am 100% sure that all human misbehavior today, like wars, global crises, hunger there and overfilled bellies here, cultural or religion-based animosity between people, relatives, or neighbors, is simply caused by a reptilian complex deeply hidden in the center of the human brain. Of course, I really can't imagine living a life without emotions at all, but simply put, this part of human beings should not be in charge over reason. It's proven too dangerous so many times.

So, in a nutshell, as soon as this part of the brain evolves down under the border of no return, I guess we should not call ourselves intelligent species. Until then, it is unwise for some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth—the chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than we would go to the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of the solar system and beyond.

The last and probably the most important from my original statement last year was the hint that we were missing something important, like a fire-like breakthrough discovery. Is that what we are missing—some space technology or a warp drive? Sure, this is the necessity; we definitely can't populate other planets or go interstellar with nowadays rockets, but in today's spirit, it seems that it is definitely something that will help our rational brain to become the real boss in our heads. Only then can we step further and say that intelligent life finally emerged on Earth. Only then can we say that our railguns are only made for mining the asteroids and not for killing people because they look different.

Is this possible?

Sure, if we are spared by some major cataclysmic event within the next couple of centuries or if we don't create one ourselves. I have all my hopes in the evolutionary process but also little doubts as well. But, when the day is bright and cheerful, I also have all my hopes that tomorrow humanity will overpass this current stage of evolution and head for something more.

Image credits:
http://eugenius330.deviantart.com/art/Message-413092189

Search for habitable planets:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/

Refs:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/28/galaxy-planets-mass-earth-life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sumer_anunnaki/reptiles/reptiles14.htm
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/stephen-hawking-no-biological-life.html
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/seti/drake_equation.html

Is Life a Zero-Player Game?

Think about it. If life really is some sort of game and we are just characters in one giant artificial intelligence play, then... Well, let's just say that we can safely recognize not very enjoyable rules we unconscionably must obey. They are simple. We must play the game. We can't quit the game. We can't win. Oh, and yes, if life really is a game, then we are only either slaves in one master-puppeteer god-like performance, or we could be just a bunch of units interacting with each other in a sort of limited free will world or a world where free will is just an illusion. Now, if life really WAS a game, what would you prefer?