4 ms·

One of the central questions of our time may become whether or not it's ethical to turn off dwarf fortress.

• spacehacker 10y ago
  It is probably ethically no worse than any killing simulation (e.g. first-person shooters). Creatures in such games arguably do not have a rich and lasting experience of processing information as humans and many animals do, so it only has a small ethical importance. My moral intuition on this matter is that the real ethical questions begin with systems that perceive, learn and can experience pain/reward: http://petrl.org http://petrl.org
  • proaralyst 10y ago
    You may have missed the joke (such things are hard to judge by the medium of text). The parent was implying that the complexity of Dwarf Fortress will grow to the point of sentience of the dwarfs themselves.
  • xenotb 10y ago
    Indeed, it is all about sentience. If we assume it's unconscious, which we probably can, then it's morally irrelevant in my opinion.
• escape_goat 10y ago
  It is probably, in a limited sense, ethical to suspend (save) the game, but not ethical to destroy the saved game file. When the game is off, the dwarves do not experience an interruption of continuity to their time. So on the face of it, there is no harm done to the dwarves if there is an existential interruption from the perspective of some external context. However, the abstraction of the dwarven universe from the universe in which it is being simulated is hardly complete. By suspending the game and keeping it in storage for several days, for instance, you are placing the dwarves at greater and greater risk that some external-universe course of events will prevent their universe from ever resuming. Furthermore, as the cycles of time which can occur in the universe ultimately face a limit with respect to the rate of the processor and the cycles of time available in the external universe, so in a very real sense you are causing a sort of existential damage to their universe. This, in fact, raises the question of ethics with respect to the resources devoted to the simulation. Is it ethical to run dwarf fortress on a consumer-grade general purpose computing device? Should not the dwarven reality be given the strongest underpinnings we can provide it, with equivalent respect given between an internal universe subjective & sentient existence an external universe subjective & sentient existence? In fact, given our moral debt as the creators of the dwarven universe, do we not actually owe them more than we owe each other?
  • pixl97 10y ago
    Heh, falling into the void of never executing again is a much better outcome than normally occurs when I'm playing. Such as building stairs and ramps in the wrong place.
  • flukus 10y ago
    I think I'd enjoy philosophy a lot more if it was always presented in dwarf fortress terms.
• leoc 10y ago
  The dwarves may simply wonder why Armok chooses to prolong their suffering.