Spring Thing reminder: Intents to Enter due by March 9th

Your friendly reminder: intents to enter the 2017 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction are due March 9th, with the games due a few weeks later on April 2nd.

There’s no longer an entry fee, but you do still need to submit your intent to enter in advance.

Check out the festival website for all the details about the event.

Intents to enter the 2017 festival are now closed. If you registered and did not receive a welcome e-mail today, please contact aaron at springthing dot net.

I"m just curious. Why is there a need to submit an intent to enter one month before the actual submission date for both the IFComp and the Spring Thing?

Is there something unique to IF that requires this? Most writing or game contests that I’ve seen don’t have this extra restriction. You either submit a game by the deadline or you don’t. Sure, I get the admins might need a few days to validate the entries before publicly posted, but a whole month?

For IFComp, at least, there is a fair amount of setup and planning for the web site. Also, as you say, validation.

There is an advantage to the organizer to be able to say “this is the potential game list” and then have all the surprises be drop-outs, not new arrivals. If there are going to be twice as many games as last year, it’s good to know about that well in advance too.

It also serves as a nudge to the authors to be thinking about their games well before the due date. You can write an IFComp entry from ground zero in a month. If you try to do it in a week, you’re probably going to wish you’d started thinking about it a month earlier.

Sorry for just seeing this, my topic notifier must have gone to spam!

What zarf said, and also submitting an intent a month in an advance is a sign of goodwill that you’ll be entering a game you’ve put some time and thought into, not something you just came up with a few hours before the deadline. Since the Thing displays any qualifying game submitted, this is a way of encouraging higher-quality submissions. (In the prior incarnation of the Spring Thing, there was also a submission fee for similar reasons.)