I’m getting ready to enlist testers for my almost-completed interactive fiction game, “The White Bull.” I’m hitting what I hope is only a speed bump. At the moment the picture is rather murky. And the speed bump (if that’s what it is) has nothing to do with my work. It’s packaged in the development system. It’s … a feature.

One of the main reasons I decided to go ahead and finish this project, which had been languishing on my hard drive for a couple of years, was the release of TADS 3.1. TADS is a very slick system for writing text adventure games, and the 3.1 release enhances its power in some cool ways. Games compiled using 3.1 will be playable in a web browser, for instance, without the need to download anything. This is a huge step forward, as it makes TADS more competitive with Inform.

But wait — there’s less.

If I understand the documentation correctly, there are two ways to deploy a game for web play. You can upload it to the IF Archive and create a page for it on IFDB. The IFDB server, which is operated by TADS developer Mike Roberts, will make your game publicly available for online play. Alternatively, you can set up your own server.

I so thoroughly do not want to learn how to set up my own server.

The tricky bit is, how am I to test the web features of a game before it’s released? The word “test” does not appear anywhere in the documentation page on setting up your game for web play. What that page does say is, once the game is compiled, players don’t have to play it online — they can download it and play it stand-alone in the old-fashioned way, using an interpreter program installed on their own computer.

That’s nice — but the first question that might occur to a savvy reader is, “Will the features of the game as it appears when  running on a remote server and being displayed in my browser be the same as the features that show up in the interpreter software that I’ve installed on my local machine?”

The answer would appear to be, “Don’t count on it.” Nikos Chantziaras has updated the cross-platform QTads interpreter for compatibility with 3.1 games, and in my tests it appears to work very well. Yay, Nikos! However…

My game has music. I’m hoping to find a graphic artist to do a few illustrations too, but the music is already built into the game. Of course, the music playback does need to be tested. My current information is that some web browsers will play mp3 files but not ogg, some will play ogg but not mp3, and some will play both. In order to test all of the configurations, then, I will need a private server that is not the IFDB server.

Except, there’s no reason even to worry about that, because the TADS web playback system doesn’t currently support audio playback. So I can’t give my users the option of web-based gameplay. There’s a theory floating around that I might be able to embed Javascript in the game so as to get audio output, but there is zero documentation on how one might go about this.

Oh, well. It was a nice concept while it lasted. Maybe someday TADS will have the features I need for online play. In the meantime, at least I got off my ass and finished writing the game, and people will be able to play it by downloading QTads.

Players today have much higher expectations. If, in writing a description of an outdoor location, you mention the distant hills and the flowering shrubs, players will expect to be able to examine them. When the shrubs are mentioned as present in the location but the response to ‘x shrubs’ is “You can’t see any such thing,” the realism of the game takes a nosedive.

I’ve now reached the point in the development of my next game where I’m going through several dozen locations and carefully adding such scenery items to each location. Scenery itself isn’t too difficult; the TADS 3 development system, which I’m using, defines a Decoration class, which serves admirably. But Decoration objects won’t always do the job. In one outdoor location there’s a prominent boulder. The boulder serves no real purpose, but that particular setting seemed to me to need a picturesque boulder. The player is bound to try ‘look behind boulder’, because hiding things behind large objects is a standard technique in interactive fiction. There’s nothing behind the boulder in this case, but nonetheless, I have to implement the command.

And what if the player tries ‘sit on boulder’ or ‘stand on boulder’? Those are reasonable commands. They don’t advance the story in the least, but if you want a realistic boulder, you really ought to handle those commands. Once I’ve done that, I have to invoke several TADS library methods so that the player can’t pick up objects that are on the ground while situated on the boulder.

I took a break from adding scenery to consider the pesky business of how large various portable objects are. TADS has a good system for preventing the player from putting large objects in small containers … but TADS doesn’t natively know that a bowling ball is large and a thimble is small. In order to get the system to work, you have to define the bowlingBall object with a bulk property of, say, 50, and the thimble container with a bulkCapacity of, say, 5. Once you’ve done that, TADS will handle the details and print out an error message if the player tries ‘put bowling ball in thimble’. But you have to add a suitable bulk property to every movable object in the game, and a suitable bulkCapacity to every container.

This whole process is about as much fun as doing the dishes. But if you want to build a model world that players can believe in, you have to do it.

I’ve barely started on the conversations. The game I’m working on has four or five major characters, plus a few others that you’ll run into along the way. The player is bound to want to chat with all of them about various topics that crop up during the story. The default message “Joe does not respond”, which would have worked fine 25 years ago, just won’t cut it today. Conversations, even when they don’t advance the story, help build realism by giving the player the impression that the characters are real people. They’re also incredibly useful for filling in story background.

TADS provides some slick tools for writing flexible conversations — but if your game has half a dozen characters and forty or fifty possible topics of conversation, as mine does, a lot of work will be needed. Plus, as the story unfolds, the characters’ responses to conversational gambits (such as ‘ask joe about beatrice’) may need to change drastically. Again, TADS provides great tools with which to do this, but the number of possible conversations starts to grow exponentially, so the writing process is not going to be polished off in a few hours.

Not only do you have to write all this stuff (“write” meaning both write the text the player will read and write the code that will cause the text to appear at the proper moment), you have to test it. If you forget to put a single plus sign ahead of a single conversation topic object, a dozen different conversations can become unavailable to the player.

Another example: Tonight I implemented a path between two outdoor locations. The TADS PathPassage class is ideal for this. But when I ran a test script to check whether an entirely different bit of business was working properly, I discovered that an important dramatic scene wasn’t working anymore. In this scene, the player character is supposed to lead another character along a particular route. The other character will protest if the player tries to deviate from the route. (TADS uses the GuidedTourState class for this.) But the route to be traversed now included a PathPassage, which meant that the other character was now refusing to let the player lead the way.

This was an easy bug to fix, fortunately. But I have a lot of sympathy for aspiring authors who feel TADS is just too darn complicated. It is complicated. It’s complicated because it lets you do so much. This is the third or fourth game I’ve written using TADS, depending on how you count. (“Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret” was a collaboration, so it only counts for 1/2.) I hope eventually to become a power user!

Even novels have had music. At some point — it would have been at least 20 years ago — Ursula Le Guin released a science fiction book that had a bind-in music CD. At least, that’s my dim recollection. I may even have owned the book at one time.

Right now I’m working on a new text game, which is due for release around April 1st. Also, I just finished writing a review of Propellerhead Reason 6 for Keyboard. I have plenty of other great music software on my hard drive, of course, but it occurred to me that it would be fun to write and record some 30-second music cues for the game using Reason exclusively.

Short cues are desirable because in an interactive game you can’t control how long the player stays in any one location. Writing longer music selections that can crossfade when the player moves from one location to another is technically feasible, but it’s a lot of extra work. What’s interesting about 30-second cues, I find, is that you really don’t have time to develop an idea. The music is just a gesture. It suggests a mood, and then it tiptoes away.

If you’re a graphic artist and would like to add yet another dimension to the game, I’d love to hear from you. This particular story doesn’t lend itself to photos, so I won’t be able to do my own graphics. A few illustrations would be a wonderful addition. The game will be released as freeware, so there’s no money to pay an artist. Well, maybe I could shake loose a few bucks. You might make as much as 50 cents an hour at it if you work fast. Tempting, I know. Plus, you’ll get the satisfaction of contributing to a really cool game.

I also lurk on the Inform 7 page of the forum. Once in a while I even skate over to the Inform 7 bug tracker, to see what new beasties have crawled out of the woodwork. Most of what I see there makes me very happy that I’ve chosen TADS.

For those who are new to this topic: Inform 7 is about 50 times more popular than TADS 3. There are several reasons for this, but leading the pack is the fact that I7′s programming syntax uses “natural language,” a subset of English — rather a small and stiffly phrased subset — that the compiler can understand.

Except, often the compiler doesn’t understand it. Inform 7 is a little like a burlap bag full of cats — it’s a seething mass of “edge cases,” places where a human’s natural way of phrasing something runs afoul of the compiler’s inflexible logic.

This stuff simply doesn’t happen in TADS 3. T3′s syntax is closely based on C++. It uses brackets, parentheses, and code blocks in a bog-standard way, so ambiguities don’t arise. To be sure, T3 is tricked out with a lot of templates and macros, which make the code easier to write while also making it look not at all like C++. But once you’ve learned how these work, writing your game is a straightforward process.

I7 has some swell features of its own. One of the best additions to TADS with the 3.1 release is, in fact, directly based on I7. Games written in I7 can be played in a web browser without downloading the game or an interpreter program, a capability toward which T3 is, as I write this, still creeping. There’s active development going on, though, so we shouldn’t have to wait too much longer.

No matter which authoring system you choose, what matters in the end is that you spend enough time learning and using it to become thoroughly familiar with its methods. Newcomers to interactive fiction authoring are attracted to I7 because it looks easy to use. I’m sure many of them give up before they ever finish writing a game. Writing a game is a complicated affair.

But 95% of it is easy, once you understand how you want to design your game. You create rooms, you create objects, you create new actions that the player can perform, you make sure the actions work in the way you want them to. This is just as easy in I7 as it is in T3.

It’s in the last 5%, where you’re trying to do complicated, tricky stuff, that the differences between the systems will leap up and smack you in the face. And by that time, you’ve already committed to an authoring system, so you muddle on through. It’s not that there’s no muddling on through in T3. It’s a different sort of muddling, that’s all.

Designing a good game is a whole other topic. Maybe more on that later.

It would be silly to deny that religious people sometimes do good things. Quite often, the good things are suggested by their pastors, or by their peers within the congregation. The question that has to be asked is, does that fact let religion off the hook? Should we respect religion as an institution because it sometimes leads people to undertake good and praiseworthy actions?

The default presumption — and this may be especially true in the United States, because it was founded by people who firmly believed in tolerance toward all religions — is that religion is entitled to respect. Today I’m going to suggest that the default presumption has it exactly backward. By default, religion is entitled to contempt.

If you feel that all religions, or some religion in particular, should be respected, the burden is on you to demonstrate why. Of course, this will require that you engage in a strict logical analysis of the real world, something that people of faith are generally either ill-equipped or afraid to do. But the fact that you’re ill-equipped to enter the fray doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. If you’re going to defend religion, you’re going to have to articulate your position in a logical manner. If you fail to do so, you really have no basis for complaint when people are contemptuous of your religion.

I’m not going to help you, either. I assert that religion is contemptible. If you’re convinced I’m wrong, prove it.

It’s quite clear that some religions actively promote hatred, cruelty, and vicious oppression. The Catholic hierarchy’s opposition to birth control and active (though tacit) support of pedophiles, the Mormons’ opposition to equal rights for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, the Evangelicals’ unceasing attempts to undermine reproductive rights, the subjugation of women by orthodox Judaism and Islam — a long list would be easy to put together.

These activities may be less energetic or less effective today than in former centuries, but that’s only because of an effective, enlightened, secular opposition! Left to their own devices, most religions would surely revert before very long to rigid social control, outright bigotry, and blind support for injustice.

Some religions are, of course, more enamored of or sunk in evil than others. The reason religion as a whole deserves our contempt is precisely this: The nice, kind, good religions give a free pass to their wicked brethren. With a wink and a nod, they charitably overlook the nasty stuff — because, hey, aren’t all religions entitled to tolerance and respect?

If you feel your religion is good, you have to earn my respect. The way you earn it is by cleansing religion — the institution as a whole — of evil. If you give evil a free pass by remaining silent about its institutional origins and institutional support, then your religion is as despicable as all the others.

I happen to have a lot of respect for the social opinions of the Unitarian Universalists, so this morning I had a look at their website. I was searching for an indication, however tenuous, that they condemned the actions of the Catholics and the Mormons. I couldn’t find one.

I downloaded a long Unitarian Universalist PDF detailing actions for social justice that the UU organization has taken over the years. I searched this document for the word “Catholic.” What I found was revealing, and underscores my point: All of the references to the Catholic Church were positive! Again and again, the Unitarians cited good stands that were taken, or good statements that were made, by the Catholic hierarchy. Yet at no point in this document (I searched it for “birth control” as well) did the Unitarians acknowledge that they are in direct opposition to the vicious oppression that is actively promoted by the Catholic Church.

If you read only this document, you’ll come away with the bizarre idea that the Unitarians and the Catholics are brothers, arms linked in solidarity as they promote social justice.

This is why religion is contemptible. The Unitarians, who are basically good people, cannot bring themselves to criticize the Catholic Church. By their silence, they make themselves complicit in the evils perpetrated by the Catholic Church. And they leave sensible people unable to respect their gutless religion.

The legal niceties of this don’t interest me. I’ve read that such a law would clearly be unconstitutional, based on an existing Supreme Court decision — but on the other hand, I don’t trust the current Court not to overturn that decision. I regard the legal situation as essentially fluid. If the law were passed, and if a school board chose to act on it, the lives of teachers and children would be disrupted for years, whatever the Court’s eventual determination.

What I am concerned about is whether it’s possible, or desirable, to remain tolerant of religion, given the fact that a person who is so manifestly a dangerous lunatic (a) has a passionate commitment to a religious faith and (b) has, in the 21st century, been elected to high public office.

I try to be tolerant; honestly, I do. I have friends and professional colleagues who are deeply religious, and I almost never discuss religion with them. Such a discussion would only lead to bad feelings. I know that people sometimes abandon their religions, and it’s wonderful that they do, but I also know that most religious people are persuaded by emotions, not logic. If they were readily swayed by logic, they wouldn’t be religious! So a logical demonstration that their beliefs are absurd is more likely to lead to hostility than to enlightenment.

However, the sheer weight of religious bullshit in public life today is getting to be too much to bear. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. Not all religious people are sick or dangerous, but quite a lot of them are — and the ones who aren’t sick or dangerous are conspicuously failing to clean up their side of the street. They are failing to denounce and ostracize the sickos.

On the contrary: The sickos are given a free pass. They get a wink and a nod, or maybe a polite “tsk-tsk-tsk.”

I have also grown more than a little suspicious of religious people who express their beliefs politely, without advocating discrimination, cruelty, ignorance, or oppression. I can’t help wondering what they say to their peers at Bible study. Their pleasant, uplifting expression of faith may be a public relations ploy — a sham. Anyone who attempts to defend religion ought to expect to be put to the test. Respect for religion is not necessary.

Right now we have a leading candidate for President who is a Mormon. On a strictly personal level, most of the Mormons of my acquaintance are very nice people. On the other hand, their religion is batshit crazy. It’s absurd, and it’s sick. How can nice people possibly believe this shit? I don’t understand that. Among their other failings, Mormons are adamantly opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. The Mormon Church pumped quite a lot of money into the campaign for Proposition 8 in California, which stands as a giant roadblock in the way of homosexual and transgender rights. And the probability that Mr. Romney will disavow his church’s stand on this issue is precisely zero.

What we have here is a large and very well funded social institution that is actively supporting and encouraging hatred, discrimination, and outright violence. Not simply by implication, either. Prominent Mormons have, in recent years, publicly advocated criminalizing homosexual behavior, and if you don’t think being thrown in prison is a form of violence, you’re as sick as the rest of them.

A member of that charming institution may very well be elected President next year — and even if he isn’t elected, his views are mainstream. He’s not way off on the margin of political discourse. In point of fact, some of his rivals for the Republican nomination are more dangerous on the issue of gay rights than Romney is, and for precisely the same reason. They’re not Mormons, but they’re religious zombies. They’re preaching hatred actively, every day. You would think somebody would sit them down and say, “Folks, you’re giving religion a bad name. Get over this love affair with vicious hatred and cruelty.” But no, that’s not going to happen. Why not? Because the non-crazy religionists (assuming there are any, and I view that as an unproven assumption) are playing kissy-face with the lunatics rather than confront them.

This is why I’m losing patience with the nice, well-behaved people who espouse a religious faith. Fuck you all.

Over on the right flank, we have a bunch of rich, arrogant morons competing for the Republican presidential nomination by advocating ideas based on religious zealotry and economic dogma, neither the zealotry nor the dogma having the remotest connection to reality. These people are extremely dangerous.

On the left flank we have a disorganized bunch of idealistic young people who have no leadership and are in constant danger of being beaten up by the police. These people have not, as yet, shown any interest in actually governing. Their message seems mostly to boil down to, “Not this — we need something better.”

In the middle we have the shamelessly corrupt Democratic Party, whose sole claim to our loyalty is, “Vote for us! We’re not nearly as scary as those other guys!”

It seems to me there’s something missing from this picture, and I think I know what it is — leaders who will tell the truth and who have a commitment to reforming the system so that it will work, so that ordinary people’s lives will improve.

I have this recurring fantasy of running for Congress. This is a terrible idea, of course. Here are the reasons why I should not run for Congress:

(1) I’m too old. I don’t have the stamina, nor the charismatic good looks.

(2) I’m known to be both an atheist and a socialist, and proud of it. Imagine the attack ads that would be rolled out against me.

(3) I don’t have a big enough bankroll. Not nearly big enough.

(4) I’m not a people person. I don’t have a network of stalwart friends who would be eager to roll up their sleeves and do the tons of volunteer work that would be essential to making a candidacy viable.

(5) I like my quiet lifestyle. I like playing the cello, going to the gym, writing magazine articles about music software, maybe even doing a little yard work. Sure, I’m basically retired — I could free up 30 or 40 hours a week to run for Congress without putting a strain on my budget. But it would put a major strain on my serenity, and I value my serenity.

Marshalled against these very cogent arguments, we have only the tiny voice that says, “Yeah, but somebody ought to do it. You know what needs to be done, and nobody else is doing it. All of those arguments against doing it are just rationalizations. You’re spinning rationalizations because you’re afraid you’d make a fool of yourself.”

Nobody else is doing it. There’s a vacuum. A vacuum sucks.

(1) The whole world is watching, or at least can watch. This is one of the things that makes the police crazy, I’m sure — they don’t get to beat on people’s heads and then claim they didn’t.

(2) The invisible people who rule the world are runnin’ scared. Why else would they send out bunches of police in the middle of the night to bust the heads of folks who are doing nothing but stand on the street carrying signs?

(3) It isn’t local. Thanks to Twitter and other social media, people who are doing things in widely scattered places can stay in touch, pass ideas around, and support one another (emotionally or even financially).

(4) Ordinary people can make a difference.

I found myself singing, “Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” A very early Bob Dylan song, from back when Bob Dylan was still cool — a period that ended in 1969, about the time “Lay, Lady, Lay” was a hit. The social protests of the ’60s pretty much coincided with the Vietnam War; when the war ended, the movement dissolved. What we have now may prove to have more legs. For one thing, the economic injustices are more broad-based. More diffuse than young men getting killed in a jungle somewhere, but also a lot more broad-based.

Also, the religious right has become a potent negative force. I haven’t noticed anybody in the Occupy movement pointing a finger at the religious right, but I think it’s implicit. There are no Jesus freaks in Occupy; the two movements are diametrically opposed.

If you look at the Republican candidates for President (I’m writing this the week of the New Hampshire primary), what you see is a bunch of plastic men who are loudly and proudly championing vicious regressive social policies of the Christian persuasion, and they’re doing it as a smokescreen. It’s a conscious attempt to whip up fervor over things that don’t matter, in order to minimize the discussion of things that do matter.

In calling attention to the things that matter, Occupy is engaged in demonstrating that the concerns of the religious right are irrelevant. Something’s happening here.

I have a friend who is quite insistent that my disinclination to show respect for religion is a form of dogmatic belief. If I understand her correctly (it’s hard to be sure), she feels that I’m insisting that I’m right, insisting that the rest of the world ought to believe what I believe.

I’m pretty sure she’s way off base. Really, the only thing I believe is that concrete evidence provides a useful corrective for unbridled fantasy. In the absence of concrete evidence, fantasy is all too likely to lead to confusion, hurt feelings, suffering, and outright cruelty.

I remember Richard Dawkins explaining the distinction this way (and I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the exact quote handy): “I’m a scientist. When someone shows me evidence of the existence of a God, I will change my mind. The difference between a scientist and a religious believer is that religious believers will tell you quite explicitly that no matter what the findings of science may be, they will not change their beliefs.” Dawkins goes on to quote a prominent religious figure as saying that no matter how much scientific evidence there might be for evolution, it would never shake his belief in the story of creation as put forth in Genesis.

The difference between my view and the view of a religious person is precisely this: I’m willing to change my mind. Just as soon as any convincing evidence of the existence of a deity is brought forward, just as soon as that evidence is examined by the best minds in the most probing manner and is found to withstand scrutiny, I will start believing in God. I would be delighted to do so. Subject, I suppose, to some qualifications depending on what may prove to be the actual characteristics of this God. I would be less than delighted to believe in the savagely bestial God depicted throughout the Old Testament.

It may be worthwhile to remember that quite a lot of scientific inquiry, over the course of the past few centuries, has been undertaken by men of religious faith who were industriously attempting to find physical evidence for the existence of God.

They failed.

What I do insist is not that I am right, but that rational discussion of such issues is appropriate, meaningful, and beneficial to all concerned. I am not willing to sit back and say, “Oh, well, everyone is entitled to their opinion on this subject, and no opinion can be judged preferable to any other. Your religion is just as likely to be correct as my skepticism.” No. It doesn’t work that way. If you want to put forward a statement about the existence, potency, intentions, or virtue of an invisible being, you will need to be prepared to defend that statement in a rational manner. If you’re not able to manage that, then I have no need to apologize for considering that you’re quite likely wrong. And not only wrong, but silly and possibly dangerous.

What I have found, now and again over the years, is that my willingness to put forward my views, incomplete and provisional though they may be, can be alarming or at least a source of nagging discomfort to people who are ill-equipped to analyze or discuss such views. Or perhaps the difficulty is that while they have more than enough intellectual equipment to defend their views rationally, they’re all too aware that their views cannot be defended in any rational manner, being entirely based on sentiment rather than on rational thought.

Insisting that I’m wrong (or that I’m dogmatic) and then declining to defend their own views in a detailed and logical manner may be comforting to them, in some obscure way, but I find it both sad and annoying. If you can’t show me exactly how I have misunderstood, how am I ever going to learn anything new?

Or at least that’s my usual thumbnail description. I’m compelled to admit that people like Aaron Reed, Erik Temple, and Andrew Plotkin are, in fact, grown-ups, and they all use and love Inform 7. So maybe I should be saying, “TADS 3 is an authoring system for grown-ups.” But that doesn’t have quite the same ring.

I’ve used Inform 7 too, but I don’t love it. It has always struck me as rather gawky and mystifying. TADS 3 is sometimes mystifying, too — but it’s mystifying in a much less mystifying way. Its syntax is always conceptually clear and concise. The syntax of Inform 7, a programming language that purports to be based on “natural language,” is sometimes a bit murky.

The 3.1 release adds two of the most attractive features of Inform 7 to TADS. Cross-fertilization of ideas is a good thing. Now if only we could get Mike to port Workbench to MacOS….

I wasn’t going to blather about the languages or their features, though. I was going to whine about the game I want to write — the game I’ve been working on, off and on but mostly off, for the past couple of years. I’m still kind of stuck. I know how I want the ending of the game to work, that part is okay, and better than okay. It’s going to be great fun! What I don’t understand is how the player is supposed to figure out what to do in order to get to the desired ending.

I’m not going to give any spoilers here (because, after all, I may sit down and finish the game, now that 3.1 is out, and then maybe you’ll want to play it), but here’s a quick synopsis. The game is a sequel to “Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina,” which was my first IF game (released in 1999). The setting, a large and somewhat creepy shopping mall called Stufftown, is the same, though because the new story is set ten years later, some of the old stores have been replaced by new ones.

Your quest in “Ballerina” was to acquire a doll from the toy store for your charming seven-year-old daughter Samantha. In the sequel, which is tentatively called “Everything but the Prom Dress,” Samantha is now 17. For reasons that are unabashedly far-fetched, she is in need of a prom dress, and quickly. You play, as before, the part of the harried parent, though this time around (unlike the first time) it’s clear that you’re the mom, not the dad. The puzzles are at least as strange and varied as in the first game. There will be more characters to interact with, though, and more detail.

I’ve worked out why it’s so darn difficult to get your hands on the prom dress. Not too much of a spoiler: A mannequin named Bianca comes to life, snatches it out of your hands, and runs off with it. Once that happens, your quest is to get the dress back from the maddening mannequin.

I’ve worked out the whole set of things you need to do in order to get it back. What perplexes me is how the player (or, for that matter, the harried parent) is to know that this particular set of exotic ingredients and manipulations is to be deployed. Will the player have to read the author’s mind? That’s not good. What’s worse, even if the player comes up with the right idea, it’s not plausible that the harried parent would know that the method would actually work. For all the harried parent knows, Bianca could respond to the player’s convoluted machinations scornfully and possessively, refusing to part with the dress under any circumstances. There seems to be no way for the harried parent to know that Bianca will, at the crucial moment when all of the puzzles have been solved, obligingly do the right thing and hand over the prom dress.

Sometimes collaborating with another author on a game can get you past a stuck point. But I pretty much have this whole game laid out. There’s not much for a collaborator to do. Drat!