We may very well be players in the ultimate game. No matter who we are or what culture we're from, we play at an early age. We play with toys pretending a wooden block is a boat. We put together model airplanes, play with dollhouses, then graduate perhaps to something more earnest like model railroading. With computers we played Pong, moved to Adventure, then things like Zork before multiplayer adventures like Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft and Second Life. Now we have avatars which we control, but we give them a certain amount of 'free will,' luck & happenstance--just to make it interesting. Our reward is points, advancement to the next level, maybe even money. Perhaps, as our games gain in sophistication, one of our avatars will look up and wonder if there is a God that made its universe. And it would be correct.

yes and this anthropomorphic interpretation of other beings and aliens etc etc [except in the sf literature] has always been a source of annoyance to me especially now when there are programs that can be set up on computers to mimic what life would evolve into on other synthesised planets given there size-rotation-revolution-tilt of axis-temp-aquaterra distribution-chemical content and so forth and then run the program and see what then would be a more reliable result of what "aliens" might look like given these factors to manipulate through simulated millions or billions of years---some months ago i think it was discovery channel that had a great serialized show that showed through computer generated animation the types of animal life that could exist millions of years from now --there should be no problem to apply the same formula to predict what other forms of intelligent life might look like on other planets-----