When the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction opens in spring 2025, you'll be able to find all the entries submitted here. Participants choose
to place their stories in either the Main Festival, where they are eligible for a Best In Show ribbon and prizes, or the Back Garden, with looser entry requirements allowing for more experimental or work-in-progress titles.
Following a successful introduction last year, we are also offering a New Game Plus category as part of the Back Garden, showcasing games that previously have been released but have been either ported to a susbtantially different system or have been significantly expanded.
Find out how to submit an entry.
Anyone is welcome to submit to Spring Thing. The organizer reserves the right to not show a submission they feel is inappropriate for the festival, but entries are not otherwise vetted, and their contents and opinions reflect the views of the original author, not the Thing as a whole.
A week after the festival opens, players can nominate games for two kinds of prize ribbons:
- A Best in Show blue ribbon, for Main Festival entries. The top two nominees each year win a Best in Show ribbon to display by their game.
- Audience Award ribbons, for all participants, which are suggested by nominators and can be anything they like: “Best Story,” “Best Parser Game,” “Personal Favorite,” “Alumni's Choice,” “Cutest Vampires”... you get the idea.
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When the festival closes, the organizer curates Audience Award suggestions to cull anything not in the celebratory spirit of the Thing before sending them to each author. The author may choose up to three Audience Awards to display on their game. Authors may choose to opt-out of receiving Audience Awards.
More details on the nomination process will be available once the festival opens.
After the festival closes, nominations also close and ribbons are awarded. The games will remain permanently available on the festival site and at the IF Archive, along with any supplemental material of the author's choosing (walkthrough, source code, etc).
