Arboria is a massively multiplayer online interactive fiction adventure. The choices you make determine the story you tell. And, if your story reaches a dead-end, we invite you to continue writing it for future Arborians to explore. Arboria's story grows and branches like a tree (dare we say, arboreally?), sprawling across the Internet of personal websites.
Arboria relies on writers like you to continue the tale. Throughout Arboria, you will a find links like this one:
Such links take you to the page owner's arboria.html
page, which lists their contact information, and anything else they
want a potential writer to know. When you have finished writing,
contact the owner so that they can link that page to your continuation.
If you have gotten here by clicking such a link, read on for information on how to write Arboria pages, as well as my contact information.
Arboria pages are just normal webpages. This means that you can use any website generator (such as Weebly or DreamWeaver), blogging software (such as Tumblr or WordPress), or even a Wiki to create your Arboria pages. If you are familiar with HTML, you can even code your Arboria pages from scratch.
You can upload your Arboria pages to your own personal website, or choose from a variety of free hosts on the Internet. If you need any help with this, feel free to contact me.
Each Arboria page should have some textual description and one or more links giving your reader options on how to proceed. Beyond that, though, your Arboria pages are your own to present. You can format them any way you wish.
Artists, feel free to use illustrations to enhance the readers’ experience. Programmers, feel free to serve dynamic Arboria pages that change depending on the time of the day. Musicians, consider what you can do with sound. I only request that your pages try to be accessible to most browsers and screenreaders — a simple test is that your pages should be usable for someone who disables CSS, and should make sense if they disable JavaScript.
You should always have an arboria.html page with
contact information, so that your readers can continue your story even
further. Of course, this means you should leave some of your storylines
open-ended by adding Continue the tale! links.
Whether or not to link to someone's page is entirely at your discretion, but I encourage you to be generous in this. It is, after all, a great honor to have your story continued by a stranger.
If you are a Github user, the easiest way to reach me is to open an issue on Arboria's repository. There's a nice template to guide you through everything.
Otherwise, you can email me directly at the address contact at comfortably numbered dot app spot mail dot com — no spaces, of course.
If you are writing because you want to contribute a page to Arboria, here is a simple checklist to make sure you didn't forget anything:
- I am continuing the story from the page (put link here).
- The link to my continuation is (put link here).
- I made sure to include a way for readers to contact me and continue my story (put link here).
- Optional survey question: My Arboria-writing experience was (insert adjective here).