Mathbrush, "77 Verbs"
I don't know about spring itself, but I can tell you that Spring Thing has started. Where the Interactive Fiction Competition runs in October and November, the Spring Thing runs six months later, in April. I have a special feeling for the Spring Thing, since my first two pieces of interactive fiction were published in it: The Baron in 2006 and Fate in 2007. Both actually won the competition, but to put things in perspective, there were just four entrants a year back then. This is symptomatic of a somewhat larger problem. Unlike the IF Comp, Spring Things has no rule limiting how long a piece can be, making it in theory the ideal venue for longer works. But the IF Comp has always been the more popular of the two competitions, not just in terms of the number of games that were entered, but also in terms of the amount of attention paid to those games -- the amount of reviews, feedback, and so on. And this means that authors of longer games have often opted to enter their pieces ...