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So we’d have all of these states and societies, each with a good amount of detail about how they survived in the barren flat wastes represented by a paved area or whatever (they built cave civilisations in the cracks between the paving slabs). And then it would rain in our world, and sea levels would rise and new lakes and oceans (puddles) would form over the course of a few years, and creat cities would be submerged, and we’d redraw the maps and track the displaced refugees as they tried to seek asylum in the cities of the proud nation that lived on the plateau of a nearby tree stump, with whom they had just a century ago fought a bitter war over ownership of the rich agricultural land left in the wake of the last flood. The ruler of that nation sent down a herald with a dismissive message, sparking a riot that resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the destruction of the complex system of pulleys and cages which was the only easy way to get to the top of the stump, and had been considered one of the great engineering marvels of the continent represented by the top playing field. The loss of their main trade route (and inability to quickly repair it because of the large angry refugee camp at the bottom) was the beginning of the end for that civilisation.

People favoured the nations that they themselves had invented of course, but there was no ownership of the nations or their decisions, so it was a different experience from what you’re talking about.

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Ooh, I’m on that! It’s called Jennifer Government, or NationStates.

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A country can just declare “I appreciate it, guys, but I’m not interested in military stuff” and everyone except the village idiot will leave them alone. I say this as someone who has declared his lack of interest in military stuff and been left alone in that regard by everyone except the village idiot.

As for “forks in the timeline”, aside one project of Scott’s that was explicitly a quantum fork, it’s better to just say that a timeline only exists insofar as people feel the need to write one. I guess you could call an idea that doesn’t get developed properly and that people don’t reference could be called a sort of a “fork”, but even then, sometimes people like digging up really obscure and small stuff that someone else wrote just to put more detail into their own stories, so it’s hard to point at any post that was made in good faith and say it’s not canon.

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For instance, back in 2007 there was a lot of action going on on two planets at the same time. Someone had decided they weren’t happy with the way the way the organisation that handles land claims was being run (and there were reasons to be unhappy which the break-up actually did lead to fixing). But it was all within the game, and when someone wrote up a gate that allowed travel between the two worlds, people (AFAIK) pretty happily accepted it as canonical. In fact, that other world project kind of died away, but the gate is still occasionally referenced.

The approach with a single unchanging geography works pretty well IMO for a community where you can never tell whether a new guy is going to last a couple of weeks or five years. Nations rise and fall, some make their mark through doing something interesting enough that they get referred to a lot in other people’s posts, some that don’t do anything particularly cool or don’t make themselves known to the community are eventually forgotten about aside maybe a blotch of color somewhere in the depths of the map archive.

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