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[Mister Always]

"Gay marriage does not belong in a game", my sweaty jeans-clad ass. Opposition to gay marriage does not belong in the goddamn world. Anyone who does not realize this needs a firm kick in the dick.

Yes. Even the pope. You heard me. I will kick the goddamn pope in his goddamn dick.

(Okay, I was joking at the end, there. Rational discourse is the best option. Failing that, kicks in the dick. But not for the pope. That dude's just from a different time.)

[psychologicalshock]

To the topic in general: Do not want.

[Mister Always]

Do not want.

What? "Do not want" to homosexual relationships in DF?

Magma for you!

[psychologicalshock]

Do not want.

What? "Do not want" to homosexual relationships in DF?

Magma for you!

Yep I don't want it in my game - I am quite fine with DF remaining non-sexual.

[devek]

I think ahonek has a point, but ignoring the issue completely and vanishing gays out of existence hardly seems to be the optimal remedy.

The issue isn't ignored. To say that it is ignored is blind to everything that has officially been said about the subject.

Dwarfs have no personality, romance, or a concept of love. You need straight dwarfs before you can have gay dwarfs.

[Mister Always]

Do not want.

What? "Do not want" to homosexual relationships in DF?

Magma for you!

Yep I don't want it in my game - I am quite fine with DF remaining non-sexual.

DF already has heterosexual marriage, though.

[Gloster]

Both post above by devek and psychologicalshock are factually wrong. Dwarf have romance and sex and children and friendships and grudges and the goal is for them to have personalities eventually.

Dwarfs are currently all clearly sexual and straight.

[devek]

Lol, if you think having children makes someone someone straight you haven't experienced much of the real world. Like I said earlier, the married tag in DF means nothing more than breeding.

People may happen to be gay or straight, but people are not gay or straight. If you were to model real world behavior you would have to assign a personality and emotional needs to dwarfs that would cause them to seek out partners that may or may not be members of the same sex. Making a gay dwarf that went after every male in the fortress would be stupid and unrealistic, people don't work that way.

[NW_Kohaku]

What the?  This topic certainly exploded when I went to sleep...

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not against giving them personality at all. My point is that, if you were to implement, or not, implement things like that, the media and some zealot nutjobs should be the least of the reasons for not doing it. Practical reasoning is far better.

Somehow, I really, really doubt that.

It doesn't matter if we have the ability to build our fortress into the shape of a giant swastika, and commit genocide against any creature that doesn't have blue eyes, pale skin, and yellow hair (cows and humanoids alike), the media won't care because the media won't have the ability to put an image of Dwarf Fortress up on the television screen without having to spend an hour explaining how a smiley face with a red background means that smiley face is dead, and going through the details menu to -- ah screw that, they won't even take the time to figure out how to even figure out how to do that much.

These are the people who couldn't be bothered to play Grand Theft Auto when talking about how "you could kill whores and get your money back", and that game is simple enough for a 5-year-old to learn in minutes. 

Do we really want to drag the bigotry and ignorance of the real world into this amazing game?

Do I need to be closed-minded to feel uncomfortable when people are exiled for being homosexual? I can't tell if you're being serious.
How about we have some civilizations beat homosexuals to death in the streets, to foster a more realistic cultural simulation?

Do you see what I'm getting at? It's not appropriate to have these things in this game.

If your adventurer dies, they put his/her head on a pike.  Even if they liked him/her. 

We have elves that are cannibals.

We have mass vomiting.

We have diseases that cause the skin and eyes to melt off, and leave the few people who survive as horribly disfigured, pain-insensitive, PTSD victims from watching all their friends melt into goo living naked in a cave eating raw giant maggots off the ground while covered in their own mud, blood, and vomit.

We, as players, make games out of finding creative ways to commit genocide on kittens.

So yes, I'd think making homosexuality a crime with a death sentence attached to it would be appropriate for this game. 

At least it makes more sense in terms of letting the player actually play with the social concepts and ethics and morals that are important to them than cave adaptation leading to mass vomiting does.


... 4 ninjas while I was typing that...

[NW_Kohaku]

Lol, if you think having children makes someone someone straight you haven't experienced much of the real world. Like I said earlier, the married tag in DF means nothing more than breeding.

People may happen to be gay or straight, but people are not gay or straight. If you were to model real world behavior you would have to assign a personality and emotional needs to dwarfs that would cause them to seek out partners that may or may not be members of the same sex. Making a gay dwarf that went after every male in the fortress would be stupid and unrealistic, people don't work that way.

No, Gloster said they are "currently sexual and straight". 

They are "sexual" because they form relationships that result in having children - that is a sexual relationship, so that half of the boolean logic operation returns "true". 

Now, for an "and" operation, both sides need to be true, so we check the next.

Dwarves are "straight" because they will form romantic relations ("Lover" and above) with opposite-gender members of their own species.  They only go to "Friends" if they are of the same gender, or don't have genders (since you don't need a [MALE] or [FEMALE] tag).

So this is a completely true statement. 

It just isn't a statement that this will always be the case, or should always be the case, as you seem to think it implies.


This, of course, also brings up inter-species marriage, though.

I mean, a gay marriage is one where no children will result.  A marriage where a dwarf woman marries an elven man is also one where no children will result.  Why not make this just as much a part of ethics?

It's actually fairly close to the same argument, although because elves and dwarves are fantastic creatures, it doesn't have the loaded emotionality of homosexuality, and it seems much more popular.

We can have "elf-lovers" getting stoned to death by "defenders of racial purity" dwarves in the ethics files, too.

[ahonek]

NW_Kohaku:

Adventurer heads on pikes, cannibal elves, mass vomiting, horrific diseases, and mass kitten genocide are things that we wouldn't want to deal with in real life. I understand that.

But I am going to claim that no rational people are going to feel physically or emotionally uncomfortable due to those things, primarily because they do not involve issues as sensitive as sexual-orientation-based abuse. The above "issues" also don't actually happen in real life, at least for the most part (read: they don't happen enough to make enough people feel uncomfortable when they see them in games). Abuse of sexual "deviants" is widespread and rampant, and it's a fact that many, many people have personal experiences with this. That's what makes it inappropriate for the game.

However, on a practical note, having listened to the most recent DF Talk where Tarn mentions not wanting to bring racism into the game (by forbidding certain races to enter your tavern), I feel 100% confident that he's not going to put this sensitive issue into the game either. And I, along with most of the player base of DF I predict, am entirely fine with that.

[Gloster]

Kohaku, I don't know what gender you are, but I'm sending you a grateful kiss.

[NW_Kohaku]

But I am going to claim that no rational people are going to feel physically or emotionally uncomfortable due to those things, primarily because they do not involve issues as sensitive as sexual-orientation-based abuse. The above "issues" also don't actually happen in real life, at least for the most part (read: they don't happen enough to make enough people feel uncomfortable when they see them in games). Abuse of sexual "deviants" is widespread and rampant, and it's a fact that many, many people have personal experiences with this. That's what makes it inappropriate for the game.

However, having listened to the most recent DF Talk where Tarn mentions not wanting to bring racism into the game (by forbidding certain races to enter your tavern), I feel 100% confident that he's not going to put this sensitive issue into the game either. And I, along with most of the player base of DF I predict, am entirely fine with that.

The problem with that sentiment is that we already are bringing the issue into the game.

The notion that "gayness doesn't exist," or "it's just a lifestyle choice" is a political standpoint taken by the most extreme of anti-homosexuality crusaders, as justification for what they do.  By going to lengths to "disappear the queers", you are making a pretty major statement about the game and its stance on the subject.

That's why there was that Toady quote on the subject (thanks for finding that, G-Flex):

I don't think this game should shy away from an important human topic simply because it's currently a hot-button political issue.

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.

Trying to not make a decision on homosexuality is also a decision on how to deal with homosexuality, and it is almost certainly the wrong one.  People will forgive Toady for not doing it for now, because there are more pressing issues for him to work on, and he just hasn't taken the time to put this sort of thing in, but that doesn't mean that some day down the road, when personalities and romances and ethics and social modeling are more important aspects of the game, this topic will eventually have to be addressed.

I'm sure Toady will let you punch in "[ETHIC:PERSECUTE_HOMOSEXUALS:UNTHINKABLE]" on if you really want.  Maybe it's even going to be the vanilla standard.  But that doesn't mean we should side with the notion that there is no such thing as homosexuality, just "deviant lifestyles" in this game at all.

[devek]

No, Gloster said they are "currently sexual and straight". 

They are "sexual" because they form relationships that result in having children - that is a sexual relationship, so that half of the boolean logic operation returns "true". 

Now, for an "and" operation, both sides need to be true, so we check the next.

Dwarves are "straight" because they will form romantic relations ("Lover" and above) with opposite-gender members of their own species.  They only go to "Friends" if they are of the same gender, or don't have genders (since you don't need a [MALE] or [FEMALE] tag).

I'm going to have to disagree. Dwarfs want to have children, MECHANICALLY the only way they can do it is via marriage. That doesn't make them straight. Probably the best thing to do as a band aid until dwarf personally is implemented is maybe to relabel the marriage/lover tag to more accurately describe what is going on from a mechanics standpoint.

If we lived in a reality where the only way a gay person could have a child is to marry a person of the opposite sex, they would be doing that too.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm going to have to disagree. Dwarfs want to have children, MECHANICALLY the only way they can do it is via marriage. That doesn't make them straight. Probably the best thing to do as a band aid until dwarf personally is implemented is maybe to relabel the marriage/lover tag to more accurately describe what is going on from a mechanics standpoint.

If we lived in a reality where the only way a gay person could have a child is to marry a person of the opposite sex, they would be doing that too.

No, look up the relationships screen from the dwarves' personal screens.  They have a list of relationships, and they are capable of having "LOVER" relationships... but only with the opposite gender.

Or, to put it in other words, dwarves currently are mechanically incapable of "loving" (romantically) anyone who is not a member of the opposite sex of their species. 

They are capable of (romantically) loving members of the opposite sex of their species, but not of their own sex, and those with no sex tags at all are incapable of loving or being loved, ever.

Dwarves cannot form relationships of any kind outside their species, at that.  If you have an elf or human or goblin or whatever in your fortress for some reason, those creatures will only talk with their own species.