I have been wasting a few good hours tonight playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 under MAME while others re-edit the Tetrinet addiction that hit Debian a few years ago already. But this is completely offtopic.

A few minutes ago I was working on packaging Freeciv 2.0beta6 for Debian and realised I have refused to do a few things while playing due to ethical issues.

Freeciv is a free clone of the good and famous DOS "Civilization II" game, for UNIX and Windows. The player starts with a small civilisation and the goal of the game is to either defeat all the enemy civilisations or launching a spaceship that reaches Alpha Centauri before any other civilisation. You do this through population and military growth, and technology advances.

At some point of the game, you discover Nuclear Fission, and soon enough your people develops a nuclear bomb. Using a nuclear bomb against another civilisation has a few effects:

• your population will be so pissed at you that you might face a civil war or big strikes that damage your economy.
• the area targetted by the nuclear bomb will be very contaminated and this will contribute to damaging the global environment.
• your enemy will be quite fucked up

Well, it's a game and all, but until now, I have not been able to use the bomb against my enemies, human or computer-controlled. I haven't been able because "it is not right", and I think if I did, I would just quit the game and start a new one. This sense of not being a total asshole while playing Freeciv has also got me to invest more researchers into developing recycling technologies to keep my contamination levels low and not contribute to global warming instead of trying to discover new, more powerful war devices that would help me not being crushed by nearby civilisations.

I guess this makes me a bad Freeciv player. :)