Spring Thing results

The results of Spring Thing '14 are now available at:

springthing.net/

Congrats to Briar Rose, who took first place for “The Price of Freedom: Innocence Lost.” Thank you to all the entrants, prize donors, and judges for participating.

Congrats to the winners! This was a fun comp to follow. Thanks for everything that entailed administering the contest. I hope people are enthusiastic for this next year, too, from the judging and writing sides.

… Well, this pretty much sums it up youtube.com/watch?v=w3NkOEgQxZA :slight_smile:

I attempted to make an account on Choose Your Story to congratulate them, but apparently it’s not working somehow. Congratulations to Briar Rose!

[rant]A good number of people on the Choose Your Story forums are under some kind of impression that we hate them and their goldurn new-fangled choice-based jazz. I personally didn’t know of that forum/design system at all, and I bet most of here would not have even known about their existence before the Spring Thing entries. And also–one of their members who challenged Sam Kabo Ashwell’s snarky review by taunting him with a link to come over there because people were saying mean things about him. They are very loosely moderated, so it’s a rough and tumble group. They howled when Sam didn’t like Briar’s game without realizing that he is probably historically one of the hugest fans of CYOA ever. To the point of writing a blog that analyzes the branching narrative structure of classic CYOA. How niche and specific can you get without being a fan?

I suppose it’s a shock when someone outside a closed community tells someone inside what they think. It would have to be like if a New York Times reviewer out of nowhere printed a review of Counterfeit Monkey saying it was horrible because word games suck, and they always lose at Scrabble so they hated it. (Sam did say right upfront something to the effect of “personal bias on the table, I already hate…”)

I was going to at least explain that the Interactive Fiction community by no means hates them as a whole. There are a few vocal people who do believe if it ain’t parser, it ain’t anything, and that’s their personal preference. The mean ones will die off soon. I for one am a development system junkie/tourist and would love to experiment on their platform. Since they’re a very closed community, and a very young community, I would guess they don’t know anything about the emergence of Twine and other choice-based or similar interactive fiction that has joined alongside parser works to make up contemporary Interactive Fiction. I’m curious how many of them know of Choice of Games, or Inklewriter, or AXMA or Vorple or Fallen London and Storynexus, and if there are authors in there who might even enjoy creating stories with a parser as well.[/rant]

Thank you!
And I know that the community as a whole doesn’t hate CYS. Unfortunately a lot of the CYS players who have that opinion were unlucky enough to stumble across quite a few members of the site who were very vocal against either CYS as a whole, or the writers involved in the competition, so basically it was just a case of a couple of people giving the site a bad impression.
I don’t really know much about any of those sites or game platforms that you’ve listed except for Twine (which does look like a really good platform to build a story-game with.)
Personally I don’t think I’d ever make a parser game, because I find those games difficult to play (I always get stuck for ages looking for the right command to use) I might use Twine sometime though :slight_smile:

Well, this was an emotional Spring Thing and no mistake. I hope we’ve ended up making a bunch of new friends! [emote]:D[/emote]

I want to say thanks to Peter Pear for being a great guy about all of this. We definitely did wrong with condemning the poor guy, and I apologize greatly for the misconduct on our site. We all love if games, and I’m hopeful that as time passes, the parser game community and the cys style game communities grow and prosper, and intermingle.

Also, thanks to aaron for being a great host for this year’s spring thing. Next year I have no doubt that they will be more IF games going into the competetion, and a whole less drama. Thanks a ton guys. [emote]:D[/emote]

I would not classify myself thus. I think fannishness is not really about nicheness or specificity or even intensity of interest, but about deep-seated love for a thing. I like some CYOA, am sort of indulgently fond of a great deal more, and I’m very interested in its workings and dynamics; but I’d be hard-pressed to say I love the medium as a whole, or very many CYOA-y works in particular. Bee, yes. I am a wholehearted fan of Bee. That’s about it, thus far. A lot of the motive for the blog series was to think about how CYOA is interesting and useful as a neighbour of parser IF, since I believe pretty strongly that disciplines get better when they’re strongly engaged with other disciplines.

This was the first Spring Thing that I completely missed since 2005. I’m a little ashamed that I couldn’t pull myself together enough to play enough games to vote, but hey, reviews! [emote]:)[/emote]

Well, first of all I intended to enter the Spring Thing - but then the deadline zoomed past before I knew it (not that I had a game ready to enter anyway but that’s just a minor point). Then I was determined to play and write reviews of all the games - which I didn’t quite get around to doing though I did reactivate my old CYS account so I might get around to it one day.

Congratulations to the winners!

And specifically to the CYS folks:

I didn’t know about your community before Spring Thing. I’m glad to know about you now! And I’m glad you got so involved and interested in Spring Thing, and I hope you will participate in more events over here in the future.

The 2017 Spring Thing is now closed. Thanks to all who participated as authors, players, and nominators!

Congratulations go to Xavid and Daniel Spitz, whose games “Niney” and “Bobby and Bonnie” split the Audience Choice ribbon in a tie. Congratulations also to Bitter Karella, who took the Alumni’s Choice ribbon for “Guttersnipe: Carnival of Regrets.” Their virtual ribbons are now hanging by their games on the Spring Thing site.

It was great to see such a cool crop of games in the festival this year. Thanks to all involved for making it another great one! =) The games, as always, will remain playable at:

http://www.springthing.net/2017

–Aaron

Thanks! It’s a real honor to be recognized. [emote]:)[/emote]

The “What’s happening next?” links at springthing.net/2017 are still pointing to 2016.

(Also the results page lists one “Audience Choice”, one “Audience Choice (tie)” and one “Alumni’s Choice (tie)”.)

Congratulations everyone!

Congrats to everyone. It was a good spring crop of games. [emote]:D[/emote]

Thanks Carolyn! I think that was only the link to last year’s results, but I removed it since it’s confusing now that this year’s are up.

Thanks Robin! Fixed now.

Congratulations everyone! I’m looking forward to giving a few more of these a play.