There’s a new short from Neil Blomkamp featuring Sharlto Copley as god, dictating actions to a butler who takes care of, chides and punishes a small group of humans in the Serengeti.

The entire “world” is set within a small map on a table in a study. Copley’s god is sitting in a chair, reading while Jeffrey, his butler, tends to the humans. Copley gets angry when the humans discover fire before he wants them to, and proceeds to chastise them by forcing them back into their cave by moving a herd of elephants to encroach on their position.

He offers them some peace of mind by giving them rain when they do a rain dance, but then decides he’s had a enough and forces Jeffrey to do away with them via plague.

The three minute short is an inventive take on a concept that’s oftentimes used in the god game strategy sub-genre, where players have the ability to command, dictate and influence actions over their AI underlings as if they were a god. The poor AI have no idea that humans are actually proliferating or punishing them at a whim. The only thing they know is that some odd events are taking place and they have no choice but to roll with it.

Eventually the technology will get to the point of what we see in the Oats short above. AR like HoloLens already offers similar experiences with Minecraft (if you can afford the devkit), and if VR ever actually gets some good games, I could easily see a high-quality god game within the sub-genre emerging that allows for that level of interactivity; being able to screw with people and kill them in inventive ways like a magic man in the sky.

The short film is part of Oats Studios’ Volume 1, which featured some other highly creative sci-fi fanfare, such as Firebase and Rakka. It’s a dire shame that these films aren’t already full length features playing in theaters, but I guess shorts are better than nothing.

You can learn more about Oats and their endeavors by visiting their official website or checking out their Steam page.