God dammit. I tried to make decent posts, provided quotes from the developer, and it devolves into homophobic claptrap that I missed out on?
Dwarf fortress is the LAST game you want a hot-button social group to be in.
Wait, why? Just because there are a lot of people who (for one reason or not) don't like gay people, that means we should pretend they don't/can't exist and that the world is perfectly heteronormative, including the entirety of various fantasy worlds?
Christ, if this were the 1960's you'd be saying not to include black people. Same logic.
Honestly, there's absolutely no reason to be offended over the inclusion of non-heterosexual characters in a fantasy world simulator. Why should you be? Hell, the game already has mass murder, war, and political usurpation/deception, not because those things are good, but because they're necessary parts of any history of human beings (or similar creatures). The same goes with issues of sexual orientation.
So no, I don't think that the game should completely ignore an issue just because some people are homophobic any more than I think it should ignore war because some people are pacifists, race because some people are racist, or strawberries because some people are allergic to them.
Some of the comments in this thread are extraordinarily fucking childish. I guess I should have expected that, though.
It will be "Indie game Dwarf Fortress simulates homophobic genocide". You know there's at least one person out there who will. Sure it has all sorts of nasty violent things in it, but you can't do anything seriously politically incorrect right now because there's no real world equivalent people in game to do them to.
This game has spawned adventure-mode stories of people tearing the eyes out of children. Do children not exist in the real world?
Yes, people will do distasteful things in-game, including to groups that exist in real life. Isolated incidents of players acting like dicks is not going to give the game a bad image. See: Toady's comments on genetics in DF and eugenics. I understand that there's an element of PR involved, but seriously, if the game can handle dismembering infants, genocide, child abduction, and the mass slaughter of intelligent animals to make trinkets out of their bones, then it can handle the possibility of some 12-year-old of a player killing gay dudes because he's immature.
Seriously, some of you guys need to take a step back and listen to what you're saying and think about it for a second.