That's it, think about it guys, its one of the most depressing or thing you can think about, we all agree that if live exists outside then intelligent life should also exist, even if its rare, but intelligent life that can travel in space and leave marks should also exist, considering that life appeared on earth just few hundred millions years after oceans appeared ( or at least that's what we think now, it could have appeared even earlier ) i think that life can appear pretty much everywhere as long as there are lands and oceans and underwater volcanos which seem to happen a lot, just in our solar system we have europa which has a huge ocean and a shit ton of underwater volcanos due to Jupiter creating huge tides.

Anyway, think about it, look at us, we barely advanced in term of space exploration since we went to the moon, and i talk about our capacity of putting peoples at least all over our solar system and later all over our neighbor stars, but no, it seems to be too hard to just go to our moon or to Mars, but the evolution of computers went so far that we can now control things with our mind, i think that every aliens went through that, and must have had a depressive life finding that the universe is dead empty, that traveling is hard and takes too long, that that's it, there is nothing more in this life,no fairy, no magics, no super space travel, no supernatural, its plain boring, so at one point they just sort of came with a tech like Sword Art Online but better, uploading their minds on a new universe but computer created, where they finally can do all they want, where they can find the magic they all wanted, where things aren't boring

tl;dr ayys just got depressed and bored of being wagies in a futuristic society filled with dread and boredom of being stuck in their solar system and decided to upload themselves on their VR Gmod but in better