playing God

[Metric]

Let's fast forward a couple centuries in technology, and suppose you have access to (for our purposes) nearly unlimited computing power. Suppose you write a computer program that simulates a world with rules where life is likely to evolve. You then run this program, and sure enough after a while life evolves in your computer universe, and eventually (to your great interest -- let's say you're a grad student studying such things) intelligent life which spends a good deal of its time communicating with other members of its species, building civilizations and lives for themselves, trying to understand the universe they inhabit, and perhaps going to war over resources from time to time.

Since you are completely omnipotent over this universe, what are your responsibilities to these life forms, and at what point do you become responsible?

And if your computing power should, at the end of the semester, be required by the university for other purposes and projects, are you prepared to break any rules to prevent your program from being deleted?