Aye. I used to have a glider (in un-animated ascii art, though) in my email signature for years and years. There was a push at one point to make the glider into a sort of "symbol" or "logo" (in the sense of the rainbow flag, perhaps), but it didn't catch on.
I first came across Game of Life back in the 80's, in the Computer Recreations column of my fathers' Scientific American which I read religiously even if I understood only a fraction of it. See also: Redcode