Willing Suspension of Disbelief vs. Inner Consistency of Reality
Whenever I hear the term Willing Suspernsion of Disbelief it hurts, because the idea is that when I approach the fictious world I'm supposed to believe in anything. I can see what comes out of this concept and it's simply bad game worlds without inner consistency of reality. If game worlds are approached as something that is given the inner consistency of reality then suddenly the designer works hard to make the world believeable. Not as something which I ought not to beleive in, but as something that is worthwhile.
We are not fooled by fiction. We know it's fiction and relate to it as fiction. That does not mean however, that fiction is irrelevant. On the contrary. Because it is something we can relate to as being something different from everyday life, we are able to put our life into a new context and get a better understanding of our own world.