* or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends
Held annually since 2002, Spring Thing has traditionally been a smaller counterweight to the more crowded fall Interactive Fiction Competition for new text-based computer games. Longer, more polished projects are encouraged, and several notable games have debuted here over the years, including The Baron and Blue Lacuna.
Originally a ranked competition for parser-based IF, the Thing today puts the focus more on bringing authors together to celebrate new text games in many different formats.
Games in the Main Festival can be nominated for two "ribbons": an Audience Choice ribbon, which anyone can nominate a game for, and an Alumni's Choice ribbon given by past participants. Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes, which every entrant has a chance to receive.
Check out the Participate! page if you're interested in entering, donating a prize, or playing the games.
Popularized by Infocom in the early 1980s, the term "interactive fiction" has long held a special meaning for fans of parser-based text adventures. The term is often used to mean exclusively this kind of game, as in the scholarly study Twisty Little Passages.
However, as a delightful, reasonably vague, and eminently multi-purpose term, it's often been reclaimed or reinvented by other communities of digital storytelling. Rather than get hung up on tradition, the Thing welcomes any game whose identifying feature is using words to tell an interactive story.
Fine, then, what do we mean by “identifying feature?” Essentially, we're talking about games that would still be recognizably the same work if everything other than the text and the way you interact with it were removed. For instance, while the classic illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are a delightful, recognizable part of the work, most people would agree that a plain-text version from Project Gutenberg is still Alice. On the other hand, while Dear Esther's story is mostly told through spoken text, if the visuals and music were removed, it would be a radically different work of art.
Alice is Alice even without pictures, but Esther is not.
Of course, this is still a subjective judgment, and it's one we'd like to leave up to authors whenever possible. If the competition organizer feels your submission is inappropriate for Spring Thing, we'll have a conversation about it. We'd like to err on the side of including a wide variety of works, but the organizer will have final say on what games to exhibit.