Spring Thing 2025 seeks prize donors!

Competitions Spring Thing
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Spring Thing, the annual festival for interactive fiction, is actively seeking prize donors for the 2025 festival!

Rather than cash donations as in prior years, prizes now work more like “Secret Santa”: donors put up cool, quirky, or hand-crafted items (physical or digital) that a fellow lover of text games might enjoy, and when the festival closes, entrants in the Main Festival pick from available prizes in random order.

Need ideas for prizes? Check out the prize lists for past Spring Things (such as ’23 or ’24), or look at the current or past prize lists for IF Comp. Prizes with a personal or homemade touch are especially welcome.

Don’t want to ship something? There are plenty of great non-physical prize ideas, too, such as placing a gift order on Amazon; a Steam code for a cool story game; play time credits for an online interactive narrative; game PDFs from an online bundle; or a handmade digital gift such as music or artwork. Feel free to post other ideas or suggestions below.

If you’d like to donate a prize, please PM me here or email brian@springthing.net. Thanks in advance!

Fine print: keep in mind that part of your prize donation, if it’s a physical item, is the cost of shipping it to the recipient, who may be from a different country than you. The festival organizer may be able to help subsidize shipping if you have a cool prize idea but can’t afford to ship it. Delivery of prizes won’t happen until after the festival closes in May.

PS: A couple of people have already offered prizes. I plan on getting those listed in the next few days!

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Sorry : “PM” :confused:

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Thanks for the several people who have already reached out to donate prizes! These should be up now.

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Senica Interactive Fiction (SIF) team is throwing a prize for all Spring Thing reviewers as a “thank you” token for what we believe is the real genius loci of this event - your reviews. It is a physical Spring Thing badge (see photo from my kitchen) so apart from asking for one, you need also to be willing to share a snail mail address of some sort so that we are able to ship it. Brian says that since our entry is in the Back Garden, this won’t be undersood as bribing the jury :slight_smile:

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Thank you to everyone who’s donated prizes this year!

We are up to about 13 prizes available, while there are 28 games eligible for prizes. In the past three or four years, there is one donor who has regularly donated the majority of prizes who is unavailable this year.

So, we’re a bit short this year. It’s not mandatory that everyone has to receive a prize every year, but if anyone has some extra things they’d be willing to put up, I’d be happy to offer them, whether it’s steam keys, copies of a book you wrote, offers to help test a future game, old Infocom memorabilia hidden in your basement, or anything else you’d like to offer.

Again, there’s no obligation, but I just thought I’d ask. Thanks!

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