i first encountered david t. marchand’s twine stories because he very generously translated two of mine from english to spanish – town and afternoon in the house of secrets. i love twine for a lot of reasons: for the simplicity of writing with it, for one.

but what fascinates me about david’s twine offerings are the ways he manages to play with perspective and tense – particularly because he does so in ways that traditional “parser-based” interactive fiction - the kind that tries to present the illusion that it will interact with any possible english sentence the player could construct – would not be capable of. how he does this is really obvious – and gratifying – in úrquel the black dragon (english and spanish), but more subtle in eioioio (also in english and spanish).