Spring Thing is an annual competition highlighting text adventure games and other works of

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

, also known as

Interactive Fiction Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...

, or IF. Adam Cadre, author of several works of

, including '' Photopia'' and '' Varicella'', first announced the Spring Thing in 2001, both to promote works that would be longer than those entered into the

Interactive Fiction Competition The Interactive Fiction Competition (also known as IFComp) is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours pla ...

, and to encourage authors to submit works to the general public during other times of the year. The competition was first ran in 2002, with Cadre hosting it in both 2002 and 2003. Cadre did not host it the following year. After this year of inactivity, Greg Boettcher picked up the slack, and hosted the Spring Thing from 2005 until 2013. During these years, the Thing became a mainstay of the parser IF community. Aaron A. Reed took over from Boettcher in 2014, and rebranded Spring Thing as a "festival" of interactive fiction in 2015. Reed managed the Spring Thing until 2022, when he passed off the competition to Brian Rushton, who has been organizing the event since. As with the better-known Interactive Fiction Competition, works submitted to the Spring Thing must be released as

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

. Unlike the Interactive Fiction Competition, Spring Thing focuses on "bringing together new text games of all kinds: choice-based stories, gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, text adventures, narrative roguelikes, and wild new experiments" and does not feature rankings, but ribbons voted on by players. Entrants to the Main Garden segment of the festival may be nominated for the "Best In Show" ribbon, while all entrants are eligible for custom "Audience Award" ribbons. In the 2025 edition of the Thing, a new category was added to the Back Garden section—the New Game Plus category—with the intent of showcasing previously released games that have either been ported to a new system or else undergone significant expansion.

List of winners to date

*2002: ''Tinseltown Blues'' by Chip Hayes - the sole entrant in that year *2003: ''Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus'' by Dan Shiovitz and

Emily Short Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer. From 2020 to 2023, she was creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind ''Fallen London'' and its spinoffs. She is known for her debut game ''Galatea (computer game), Galatea'' (200 ...

*2004: No competition *2005: ''Whom the Telling Changed'' by Aaron A. Reed *2006: ''De baron'' / ''The Baron'' by Victor Gijsbers *2007: ''Fate'' by Victor Gijsbers *2008: ''Pascal's Wager'' by Doug Egan *2009: ''A Flustered Duck'' by Jim Aikin *2010: No entrants *2011: ''The Lost Islands of Alabaz'' by Michael Gentry *2012: ''The Rocket Man from the Sea'' by Janos Honkonen *2013: ''Witch's Girl'' by Mostly Useless *2014: ''The Price of Freedom: Innocence Lost'' by Briar Rose *2015: ''Toby's Nose'' by Chandler Groover (Audience Choice and Alumni's Choice) *2016: ''Tangaroa Deep'' by Astrid Dalmady (Audience Choice), ''The Xylophoniad'' by Robin Johnson (Alumni's Choice) *2017: ''Bobby and Bonnie'' by Xavid and ''Niney'' by Daniel Spitz (tie for Audience Choice) *2018: ''Illuminismo Iniziato'' by Michael J. Coyne (Audience Choice and Alumni's Choice) *2019: ''Among the Seasons'' by Kieran Green and ''The Missing Ring'' by Felicity Drake *2020: ''4x4 Galaxy'' by Agnieszka Trzaska, ''Hawk The Hunter'' by Jonathan B. Himes, and ''JELLY'' by Tom Lento and Chandler Groover *2021: ''The Weight of a Soul'' by Chin Kee Yong and ''Fish & Dagger'' by Grave Snail Games *2022: ''The Bones of Rosalinda'' by Agnieszka Trzaska and ''Fairest'' by Amanda Walker *2023: ''Protocol'' by 30x30 and ''Repeat the Ending'' by Drew Cook *2024: ''Social Democracy: An Alternate History'' by Autumn Chen and ''The Trials of Rosalinda'' by Agnieszka Trzaska *2025: ''Cut the Sky'' by SV Linwood and ''The Little Match Girl Approaches the Golden Firmament'' by Ryan Veeder

References

{{Reflist

External links

Spring Thing Home Page
Interactive fiction Video game development competitions

List of winners to date

See also

References

External links