Spring Thing actively works to create a space where all kinds of people making all kinds of games can feel welcome. Part of this work involves everyone, both authors and players, taking care to treat each other with respect.
- Authors have control over their presence in the festival, including whether to participate in ribbon nominations, and how much information to share about themselves and their games.
- As an author, be respectful of your peers. We can't control what you say, but it's not classy to trash-talk other authors during the festival, or encourage people to skip the rest of the games and just play your own. We hope you'll think of this as a chance to build bridges and make friends in a diverse and extensive community, not just cheerlead for your own corner of the map.
- Don't be a rules lawyer. If you think someone is behaving inappropriately, contact the organizer privately. Public accusations or enforcement attempts based on your perception of the rules are unhelpful.
- The festival is privately run and is explicitly a benevolent dictatorship. The organizer reserves the final right to decide what games to exhibit and how to conduct festival business.
- In particular, Spring Thing does not welcome games or authors promoting hate speech, misogyny, homophobia, or other messages designed to make a whole group of people feel awful about themselves.
Authors must abide by certain guidelines and must submit an intent to enter the festival in advance. Read on for more details.
Spring Thing is an annual festival for new works of interactive fiction. Games submitted will be exhibited as long as authors remain mindful of a few guidelines. In short, your game should be new, finished, yours, free, and interactive fiction in a broad sense of the term. You must also submit an intent to enter in advance.
- New: your game should be unreleased at the time the festival opens.
- Finished: the game should be complete, in the author's estimation, and tested.
- Yours: your entry should be your own original content, and not contain any copyrighted material you don't have the rights to.
- Free: the festival version of your game must be freely available both during the festival and in perpetuity afterwards on the IF Archive. Thus, if your game is unable to be archived in perpetuity on the IF Archive, it is ineligible for the Main Festival.
- Interactive fiction: telling a digital interactive story with words should be your game's identifying feature.
The festival additionally asks that authors submit only one game per festival year, and that submissions stay within a maximum size of 100 MB. Further clarifications on these guidelines can be found below.
The competition organizer will work with authors whose games might not be appropriate for the festival, and reserves the final right to select which games will be exhibited.
The deadline for submitting an intent to enter for the 2024 festival has now passed. Please contact the organizer if you have any questions.
Authors can also submit games for the “Back Garden,” a selection of games with looser entry requirements. These games will be exhibited and archived alongside the Main Festival games, but:
- do not take part in Best In Show ribbon nominations;
- do not take part in the prize pool;
- can be excerpts from an unreleased game, even one planned for commercial release, as long as the excerpt is polished enough to be exhibited;
- can be more experimental or use a looser definition of “interactive fiction” than Main Festival games.
The Back Garden provides a space for authors who are working on commercial IF, who don't want to compete with other games, or who are working on something cool in an IF-adjacent area. Past Back Garden submissions have included everything from tabletop roleplaying games to experimental prototypes to interactive poetry.
Back Garden games must also
submit an intent to enter
and abide by all other festival guidelines.
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 the story in Disco Elysium is mostly told through text, if the visuals and music were removed it would be a radically different experience.
Alice is Alice even without pictures, but Disco Elysium is probably not.
Right image © ZA/UM Studio.
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.
How come only one entry per year?
We want to showcase your best work, and leave space for as many authors as possible to participate. If you want to get around this rule, you could submit an “anthology” collecting several shorter works (providing each is complete and tested), or if you really want to get around it you could submit under an alias. But we'd prefer you just send us your one best thing!
Note that this rule does not prohibit being involved in collaborations, which we love to see.
What's up with the maximum submission size?
The maximum size of your Spring Thing submission materials, including all versions of your game and any multimedia assets, must be 100 MB or smaller when compressed. This has become necessary to help the Thing save bandwidth costs and keep staging and archiving festival files from becoming a burden.
If you think your submission might be larger, here's a few things you can do:
- Read up on compressing and resizing images and audio
- If your submission includes multiple platform-specific versions, consider submitting only one of them to the Thing and hosting the others yourself: we will happily link to these as part of your festival game listing.
- We very much prefer your submission to contain your entire project, so we can archive it and ensure it remains playable for years to come. However, as a last resort, consider hosting large multimedia files yourself and linking them from within your submission; or offering local "Low-res" and web-based "Hi-res" versions.
Can I submit a revised version of a previously released game?
The general idea behind the “new” guideline is that games should feel like a debut: they should have mostly new content. A translation of a game from another language or an extensively fleshed out version of a game prototyped in IntroComp or Ludum Dare would probably be cool; a minor improvement to an already existing game, not so much.
Can I sell a game I released in Spring Thing commercially?
The only right we claim is to freely distribute and archive the festival version of your game. You retain all other rights to the game you enter, and are free to sell or otherwise distribute a commercial version. However, by entering you grant the Spring Thing and the Interactive Fiction Archive the non-exclusive right to distribute the festival version of your game for free, forever.
Part of our mission is to preserve a snapshot of the kind of text games people were making at a certain point in time. We want your entry to still be playable decades from now, and this rule helps make that possible.
However, if this is unacceptable, you might consider instead releasing a demo or excerpt from your game in the Back Garden, which has looser entry requirements.
What is considered “unreleased” for purposes of entering the festival?
Your work is considered unreleased if it has never been available for purchase or download on a digital distribution platform or at a public URL. Private distribution (such as to friends for beta testing), posting on closed forums, or to private lists like a Patreon or Kickstarter backers-only post are not considered a public release.
If you have questions about this rule, please contact the festival organizer.
Can I release my interactive movie, tabletop RPG, narrative board game, or VR poetry in the Thing?
We love everything new, weird, and wonderful to do with words and games, although the Back Garden is a better space for a project you aren't sure “counts” as interactive fiction. We'd also prefer projects that don't require special equipment to play, so the widest variety of people can experience your work and so your entry can be digitally archived. Your game also needs to be completely freely available; commercial free-to-play games or titles that otherwise try to monetize some percentage of players are not appropriate for this particular event. Read over the guidelines above and, if you still have questions, feel free to contact the organizer to chat about it.
If I'm an author, can I review the other games during the festival?
While we don't have official rules about this, the community generally agrees that authors shouldn't review the games of other entrants while the festival is still open, although a quick recommendation of one you liked is okay.
Are there any restrictions on what authors can talk about during the festival? Can I canvas for ribbon nominations for my own game?
Like we could stop you. But please do review the author guidelines and try to be respectful and polite to your fellow gamemakers.
