[spacehacker]

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

[proaralyst]

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]

Indeed, it is all about sentience. If we assume it's unconscious, which we probably can, then it's morally irrelevant in my opinion.