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 no

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?