Spring Thing 2021 is now open!

Competitions Spring Thing
#1

I’m very pleased to announce that the 2021 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction is now open!

http://www.springthing.net/2021/play.html

This year, there are thirty-eight entries (shattering the previous participation record for the Thing!), spread across two categories. Authors chose whether to submit games to the Main Festival, where they are eligible for ribbon nominations and the prize pool, or the Back Garden, which opts out of ribbons and prizes but has looser entry requirements (including allowing excerpts from unfinished or commercial games).

In the Main Festival:

In the Back Garden:

You can play the games and find out everything you need to know about the festival at the official site, or follow us on Twitter at @SpringThingFest.

Instructions for making ribbon nominations will go up in a couple of days. Two Best in Show ribbons are awarded each year to the games that get the most nominations, and players can also create their own “Audience Award” ribbons that can be anything they like. The festival will be open for ribbon nominations until 11:59 PM EDT, May 7, 2021.

To all the players, and all the entrants, have fun!

– Aaron

21 Likes
#2

Woohooh! Will do!

2 Likes
#3

Let’s get started!

1 Like
#4

There hadn’t been a whole lot of horn-tootin’ so I’d wondered if the Spring Thing might end up small-ish. I guess the size of last year’s IF Comp should have prepared me!

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#5

I guess this is why exit polls are so often wrong :laughing:.

There were I reckon 10 intfiction.org SpringThing horn tooters over the period of a month or so.
What then happened was 38 entries, including some entirely new to this site but nevertheless working on IF projects for several years.

I take great comfort in those numbers. It means that it’s impossible to say at any moment how much digital art is being made; only that it’s more than you think.

2 Likes
#6

This year you can use some new functionality in the IFDB to randomize the list of Spring Thing 2021 games, and keep track of games you played, games you plan to play and games you are not interested in playing. Just log in and use the following link:

https://ifdb.org/search?sortby=rand&searchfor=tag%3ASpring+Thing+2021+played%3Ano+willplay%3Ano+wontplay%3Ano

When you finish investigating a game, check the I've played it, It's on my wish list and/or I'm not interested boxes, and the link above will update itself to keep everything current.

6 Likes
#7

This is going to be a really useful tool. Thank you very much for creating it!

1 Like
#8

Hooray! I am extremely excited/petrified to release my pet project (haha) to the world!

7 Likes
#9

This is a very nice feature! But I was a little confused at first, since the list is randomized every time it loads, and the number of entries in the Spring Thing means it’s split over two pages. So I first started going through games on page 1, then went to page 2 and saw several games I’d already seen.

Works fine if you make sure to only load one game at a time, check the correct checkbox, and then reload the list… Or if you click “view all” instead of using the paginated view from the start.

1 Like