What's really happening with fictional timelines

That amazingly clever monkey (in so many ways that definitely include RPG play and design) Vincent Baker is up to his new/old tricks over on his blog (http://www.lumpley.com/). In service of what I expect will be some really interesting, not yet revealed conclusions, he's talking about "fictional timelines" and "fictional positioning." After some poking, I'm pretty sure he's got a perfectly good conceptual underpinning for what he's building, but as he acknowledges, fictional timelines are tricksy beasts. So I'm putting some stuff about how I'd think about that term here, to avoid further clogging-up his progress over there.

Key to my thinking is that a "fictional timeline" is, at the fundamental level, a wholly ephemeral and arbitrary creation. Every time we need it, we recreate it in its' entirety. In the examples Vincent is using, every time a player makes a "move," and every time within that move that there is an opportunity for any of the players to communicate (in the broadest sense), it would be more accurate to say "we create a new fictional timeline" than it is to say that "the fictional timeline advances." It's also incredibly unwieldy to think/talk about it that way all the time, because quite often the new timeline we construct is a LOT like the previous one. This is particularly true within the confines of a particular move (a particular IIEE cycle, to use the Forge shorthand).

But the facts are the facts - a single, coherent fictional timeline simply doesn't exist. Yet persisting the components of the timeline each time it is created is (with caveats and nuances) often very, VERY desireable. It's not so hard to do that within a single IIEE cycle - that's part of why thinking about IIEE is so useful. But it becomes more problematic to do so across a whole session of play, and especially problematic across multiple sessions of play. Good design will really help, though, and I expect that's part of where Vincent is heading.

I wouldn't think of this as treating a fictional timeline "concretely," however - I think that lures us too far into thinking about the fictional timeline as "just like" a real world timeline. I'm not sure what to do about the fact that it's innacurate but helpful to talk about any fictional timeline other than the one we built right now. I'd rather talk about PERSISTING past (real world past) decisions about fictional elements, events and interactions than MAINTAINING a concrete timeline.

So maybe - if I were in charge, most things Vincent labels "fictional timeline" I'd just call "persistent fiction." On those occasions when it's useful to talk about the timeline of that fiction (e.g., IIEE), we can do so within the "persistent fiction" umbrella.

At least given how I'm understanding all this right now . . .