intfiction.org

The Spring Thing now accepts intents to enter: Google Groups or springthing.net

I was excited about ST, but I really don't want to give them seven dollars to prove that I'm serious about the competition. It's an ongoing debate in my mind, but do I really need that much attention, to have read and reviewed? Shouldn't the fact that you spent the time making an over 2 hour beast be enough to show that you're serious?

Is $7 really worth debating over? I spent more on my bus fare to work today and I'll probably spend about the same on my dinner.

The $7 is supposed to discourage joke games, so that better, more serious games are submitted. The fee could be a lot higher, and I'd still enter -- but I never seem to have time.

The game doesn't *have* to be big, it could be a very, very small game. I'm sure if you paid the entry fee and submitted a game that could be finished in 10 minutes, you'd still qualify.

I think that's the real reason right there. Writing a long game says you're serious, but joke games wouldn't have to be long. $7 seems like a tiny, trivial amount to me. It requires a little effort on the part of the participant, but it's not unreasonable. For the 2005 competition, I paid the fee but ended up not submitting a game after all.

I think the comp was originally intended to promote longer games (since the annual competition still promotes shorter ones) with the hopes of becoming equally important to the community. It just hasn't seemed to work out that way. It seems to get little more attention -- maybe less -- than some of the mini-comps. I think people must see it *as* just another mini-comp, but I've always thought it was intended to be something more -- an equal to the fall competition.

This could spawn a whole new topic, but these days, expectations are just higher. It takes as long today to write a good two-hour game as it probably used to require for a ten-hour game, because we're no longer satisfied with sparse implementation, lots of "that's not important" responses, the lack of many alternate noun (and especially verb) phrasings, poor puzzle design, etc. I wouldn't want to enter a two-hour game in the Spring Thing, but I wouldn't want to enter a poorly-implemented ten-hour game, either. As a result, I haven't entered anything. Lack of time and motivation is also why I've never written anything "epic" like that at all. It would take a couple years to write a long game that's of the same quality as a great IFComp entry.

Normally I would be put off by an entry fee as well, but I think originally the comp organizer played all the entries (with a transcript that is) and he didn't want to waste his time slogging through a 2+ hour game that wasn't finished. Quantity is not always quality, or even passable, though it may be serious.

Wow, over three dollars one-way for bus fare? Is that in the UK?

'I have an intent' to enter the comp, but we'll see if I complete a game. I think I'll wait until February to submit the intent. I have a few ideas but nothing even half-way done.

I would like to collaborate on a long game, but at this point it may not be the best idea for me.

My bus fare works out at £29 per 13 trips, so roughly £2.20 per trip which works out at £4.40 a day, so roughly $7 - $8 per day on bus fare. Just think, I could take a week off work and save up enough money to enter the Spring Thing five times.

I can see the reluctance to pay a $7 entry fee under the old rule system, back when the only prizes were the entry fees themselves. Thus in 2003, as I understand, the prizes were:

1st place: $14.00
2nd place: $7.00
3rd place: $3.50
4th place: $3.50

But the prizes were substantially different during the last two years, and I personally wouldn't find the $7 a deterrent anymore.

I could get rid of the entry fee, but that would defeat one of the purposes that Adam Cadre had when he started the Spring Thing, namely to provide a better playing experience for judges, and avoid the following scenario:

"The 2001 comp featured 52 games, many of them half-baked at best; discussion was limited, with a brief flurry of reviews and then not much conversation about the games, possibly because most judges only had time to play a small fraction of them." -- Adam Cadre, in describing the reasons he started the Spring Thing

Judging from what people have written on rgif, I gather that some players like the fact that the Spring Thing is a smaller competition without very many of the kind of bad games that dominate the bottom half of the IF Comp every year.

Anyway, this just adds to the diversity of stuff available for the IF community. I think we'd be losing something if I made it so that the ST was just like the IF Comp except that it's in the spring, and there's no two-hour rule.

I've probably rambled on long enough -- I hope that's a good enough answer.

Greg

It's time to retire, man! If taking a week off work is a money-making strategy, why work?

Probably a bad joke. Oh well.

Greg