The 2020 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction! * or Fall Fooferal, for our Southern Hemisphere Friends

Spring Thing is an annual online festival celebrating

new interactive fiction from all kinds of people. Welcome!

What’s Happening Now?

October 20, 2019 : Site for 2020 Thing launches; intents to enter open.

: Site for 2020 launches; intents to enter open. March 1, 2020 : Deadline for authors' intents to enter.

: Deadline for authors' intents to enter. March 29, 2020 : Deadline for entries to be submitted.

: Deadline for entries to be submitted. April 2, 2020 : Festival opens and entries available to play.

: Festival opens and entries available to play. April 9, 2020 : Ribbon nominations are now open.

: Ribbon nominations are now open. May 3, 2020: Nominations closed and ribbon winners announced.

About the Thing

Held annually since 2002, Spring Thing is a smaller, more informal counterweight to the busier fall Interactive Fiction Competition. Over the years, games have often debuted here that went on to become influential in the IF world or larger indie games scene. Rather than a competition with rankings, the 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. Spring Thing especially welcomes diverse voices and populations traditionally underrepresented in gaming, including women, people of color, queer and LGBT+ folks, and blind, neuro-diverse, or disabled creators. People from all walks of life should feel encouraged to participate as players, authors, or reviewers. Entrants to the Main Festival can be nominated for a “Best In Show” ribbon, and all entries are eligible for custom “Audience Award” ribbons. Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes, which Main Festival entrants have a chance to receive. Welcome! From the rest of the site you can find out how to donate a prize, play the stories from this year's festival or read more about its history.

What’s New?

For this year's festival, authors who submitted an intent to enter but were unable to get their game completed by the deadline can instead submit to the Late Harvest, a special showcase of games outside the main festival. See this post for more details. Starting with the 2019 festival, entries can be nominated for an overall Best In Show ribbon, or a custom Audience Award that can be anything the nominator likes: from “Best Story” to “Favorite Twine” to “Cutest Vampires.”

IF Resources

Special Thanks