24.7. Competitions

| Chapter 24: Publishing |

| 24.7. Competitions

One very common way to get players for IF is to enter the game into an IF competition. The annual IF Competition is the most prestigious and has the widest field, but the Spring Thing, the One Room Game Competition and other events also catch people's attention. Entering a competition is a path of least effort for authors promoting their new work, because the competition organizer usually takes care of hosting and archiving submitted games, promoting the competition as a whole, collecting votes, and encouraging players to post reviews. Different contests have different arrangements. The ifwiki usually posts a list of current and upcoming competitions, as well as lists of results for those recently past, on the front page:

> http://www.ifwiki.org

Some competitions also have their own websites, at least at the relevant times of year.

All the same, there are many IF works that aren't cut out for competition release. Competitions tend to be best for short or medium-short works, because judges don't necessarily have time to play a lot of long games at once, and sometimes this is a condition of entry.

It's also good for publicity to win one of the annual XYZZY Awards. All interactive fiction games released in a given year are eligible, and authors do not need to do anything to enter. As with the Oscars, though, you can't plan to win: it happens or it doesn't.

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