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[Josephus]

Hehehe.

"rigging that tunnel."

Hehehe.

Also, yes. We can't properly simulate Japanese or Greek-like cultures without tons of homosexuality. However, I wish for greater social interaction dynamics both between dwarves and worldgen entities. Homosexuality - indeed, sexuality in general - is merely a facet of those interactions.

[TheyTarget]

If your entire reason is just to get rid of kids, just change your ini file to disallow children.

It's not my entire reasoning. And I don't like messing with stuff, unless it makes it harder.

[Vaftrudner]

[long discussion of evolution]
...while the others go off 'Viking' (to 'Vike', if you'll excuse the Anglicisation of whatever the original Scandiwegian root was)... ) whenever their domain is breached.  It's a handy little tale about What Might Have Happened.  And thus probably completely wrong.

It's disputed where the word "viking" comes from. It probably comes from the word "vik" which means "bay". The affix -ing (-ingr in Old Norse) is used to create a new noun that is associated with the original word, not to produce gerunds and participles as it is used in English, so "viking" would be "someone associated with bays" or simply "bayman", assuming that "vik" is the origin. Anyway, the word "viking" has no verbal elements (yes, I am an intolerable language nerd).

Regarding your remarks on in-game evolution, while interesting I hardly see them as appropriate in DF, since the game world is actually divinely crafted at a certain point. If all the creatures in DF are created according to arbitrary divine will, and the time span of the in-game experience is less than a few thousand years, I hardly see how evolution would come into effect.

And on topic, as a gay man I would be very happy to see gay marriage in DF. It wouldn't be time-consuming to implement with the current system where sex doesn't even exist. A quick mathematical model to give a small amount of the population homo- or bisexual preferences (no one knows the cause nor prevalence, studies vary somewhere between 5-10% of any population, and anyone claiming to know the cause of homosexuality should stop writing in this thread and revolutionize the scientific world since you obviously know something completely new) like Starver and Nagidal gave examples of. Of course it's entirely up to Toady, in a fictional world with a fictional creature, but it would be a nice touch since homosexuality is so very rarely represented in a non-stereotypical way in games. And dwarves would make some kickass bears and butches.

[Naros]

So many ways to phrase that that wouldn't make you seem homophobic as you claim not to be, you know.

Like "putting this into the game would cause unnecessary controversy. Sad, but true."

I admit, I have a horrible way with words. ^____^

Not to mention his statement has no factual basis. We do not know what causes homosexuality, nor is there any hard data as far as I am aware of how widespread it is across different civilizations.

There's tons of data on the percentage of homosexuality in many (but granted, far from all) species if you'd just look for it.
But you're right, we do not know. We just know what influences how widespread it is in a population. Good thing that I did not make any claim saying what *does* 'cause' it, eh?

However, instead of getting any deeper into this, let me just say; putting this into the game would cause unnecessary controversy, like our comments on the subject have done. Sad, but true.

[Ø]

Well everything sex related in this game already only serve two purposes: reproduction and marriages.

As the game stands, all you can really do is add same-sex marriages.

To me, a 4-6% occurring personality/individuality quirk doesn't serve much purpose.

[Urist McMick]

Also, This is a game where you can go and slaughter an entire town with with some intestines, torn from a still living 4 year old girl. And in which a large majority of player dedicate most of their time to finding new and inventive ways to torture elves to death. And you reckon that homosexual dwarfs are gonna be the thing that pushes it over the edge? I think that, if it's still possible to download KZ manager, then Dwarf Fortress will be ok for a while yet.

[truckman1]

If there was no backlash against us brainstorming how to most efficiently build mermaid concentration camps, where female mermaids where chained up and forced to breed so we could slaughter their babies and harvest their bones to whittle into knick-knacks, so we could use the knick-knacks to barter for bolts of cloth and booze, then I doubt one sentence saying "oh btw Urist McMiner is gay" would cause any backlash.

[PTTG??]

Eh, It needs to be in the engine to properly model elf retreats.

 Once reproduction is fleshed out more, I could see this being implemented. It's certainly more liable to be part of a story than eyelid functioning, which got in. It's not like Three Toe and Toady one have ever shied away from controversy in games.

[devek]

Dwarfs apparently don't even have sex before marriage.

I think what would be better is to allow dwarfs to form bromances. It is the same thing as being gay, but you can have a wife and kids too.

[Bohandas]

A thought on possibly implementing gay dwarves just by editing the raws of the current version:

Its kind of a cop-out, but this might work. Hypothetically, you could make them all hermaphorodites but call them male, and then disable the birth announcements so that it seems that any baby dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground.

In "creature_standard" replace the text

   "[CASTE:FEMALE]
      [FEMALE]
      [MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE]
   [CASTE:MALE]
      [MALE]
      [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:FACIAL_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS]"

with the new text:

   "[CASTE:MALE]
      [MALE]
      [FEMALE]
      [MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE]
      [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:FACIAL_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS]"

If that doesn't work, you could try the even more of a copout:

   "[CASTE:DUDES]
      [FEMALE]
      [MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE]
      [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:FACIAL_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS]
   [CASTE:MALE]
      [MALE]
      [BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:FACIAL_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS]"



and then, in either case, in "...data/init/announcements.txt" either remove the following text:

"[BIRTH_CITIZEN:A_D:D_D:P:R]"

or else edit it to read
"[BIRTH_CITIZEN:P:R]"

[smariot]

I don't think DF should explicitly have a [HOMOSEXUAL] tag, but it might be useful to use [MALE] and [FEMALE] just for selecting the correct pronouns in descriptions, and have caste tag describing the relative weights for the castes a particular caste can be impregnated by, and a similar tag for describing the castes this caste will marry.

Then you can have things like pregnant male seahorses, and same sex (or as far as the game is concerned, same caste) marriage.

[Vaftrudner]

Dwarfs apparently don't even have sex before marriage.

I think what would be better is to allow dwarfs to form bromances. It is the same thing as being gay, but you can have a wife and kids too.

No, it's not. A bromance is a close friendship between emotionally open men, and the only reason for it to have a word was that it was culturally limited to women in the west during most of the 20th century. A gay relationship is not friendship, it's love. Or sex, but that's not implemented. Do dwarves love? I have no idea, but they marry, so I assume that they experience some form of romantic love.

[G-Flex]

Wow, you don't like homosexuals do you?

I'm in the armed forces, there are loads of homosexuals in here, I get on fine with them, go to war with them, go clubbing with them, but really, does it have to even be discussed as a possible feature for a game such as DF?

There's no reason why not, because one of DF's goals is to simulate fictional (and fantastical) cultures with a rather precise level of detail. If you look at the development goals (especially the older lists), it's well within the scope of the game.

After all, how could it not be? Sexuality is an extremely important aspect of both personal life and culture. It could be an interesting thing to explore, and it doesn't make much sense to ignore something that important when trying to model societies and people. If you look at societies past and present, how they treat gender roles, sexuality, and sexual orientation winds up being a very prominent subject, and those all tie into each other and other things. For that matter, we're not even anywhere close to approaching the kind of social detail Toady and Threetoe talk about, yet we already have things like gender-restricted entity positions (e.g. elves and their war princesses).


As an aside, I have no idea why people in this thread keep mentioning statistics with regards to how many people in a given dwarven fortress would be gay. Why are we assuming that a fantasy-world society of fantasy-world people based on both dwarves and medieval Europe would have the same ideas or statistics regarding sexual orientation as modern-day America does, especially when that's not even true of societies in the real world? The most interesting thing to come of this, after all, would be how different civs/races deal with these things in contrast to one another (in addition to individuals).

Also, there's this post:

(someone had asked if there would be plans for non-heterosexual creatures)

That's actually a good question. A friend of mine recently asked me "Is Dwarf Fortress heteronormative?" jokingly, but I seriously do wonder that.

Heterosexual marriage, children and all that went in fairly quickly to establish world gen with simple, ongoing histories, and so you'd be able to continue on your possibly isolated fortresses as well.  We've even got a marriage sphere, since gods of marriage are very common.  These days it might look like a political stake driven into the ground, but that's simply not the case.  As for where it goes from here, it's sort of a choice of which realities you want to model, which you want to idealize, which you want to omit, and how they are all prioritized -- I've added lots of physical characteristics now, without racism, and that more or less points toward adding sexual orientations and having them all merge in naturally in every society.

(emphasis mine)

So yeah, that's probably the most we've heard from him on this subject in particular.

[kaijyuu]

Would be interesting. Wouldn't matter much beyond another detail on the dwarf's info page, but hey, DF is built on ridiculous detail.

[Naros]

Good points have been made, so I withdraw my statements.

Bring the gay! ^_^