This is an excellent topic of discussion, particularly for those who are more into lore building.
Unsurprisingly, this is a question I'm constantly asking myself, both of myself, and of others. I think the answer varies. Some cases, the challenge is purely fictional and bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever, it exists solely as an exercise in gaming. At the other end of the spectrum, it is something that either replicates, or even
replaces real life entirely. More complicated still is the fiction that attempts to insert itself in parallel with real life.
To put it simply, I think it is too difficult to impose any kind of uniform standard on every single player, but it is important to know where each of them stands (or whether they do). Some degree of freedom is necessary in cases where the fictions of different players intersect.
For my part, the way my fictional universe operates is largely due to my collaborator (Cen), who is adept at comprehensive fictional world building. It's one in which certain conditions and parameters of my own fictional company are very tightly controlled insofar as character interactions, motive, logistics and even concurrent real world conditions (and economic outlook) are concerned, and even if my fiction and company is largely concerned with things ludicrous and mad, I go to some lengths to ensure that every action has an appropriate reaction and that the numbers add up as far as the Automation simulation goes. As a result, I feel like even though the development cycle of my company is quite severely compressed (a unique model a year put a huge strain on the budget as well as core staff morale), at least the struggle and growth and the risk in the story has a compelling edge to it, and there's a certain kind of satisfaction in meeting the challenge of having to reevaluate engineering decisions beyond simply cranking the sliders willy-nilly.
On the other hand, since this is a car forum, I do deliberately ignore or gloss over other social aspects of our world and focus largely on the automotive industry and motorsports. I also assume the existence of several of the motor companies from this forum
alongside those of the real ones, and therein lies the big shift away from reality: this assumes that the automotive industry is more central as a whole to the world, and also ignores any user whose preferences are that their company exists in a world without any real life parallels. I have to leave a fairly large grey area here, and at least insofar as my fiction goes, I can somewhat afford to do this because due to the nature of my company, I can afford to focus on the world of 'flash-in-the-pan' hypercar manufactures, 98% of which vaporise before they can make anything real, let alone sell it.
The other reason I leave a lot of grey area is because I further distort and subvert the fictional relation to reality by depicting it in a cartoon world, which is probably the biggest twist here. The advantage of this is that it affords us a
lot of liberties in alluding to real-life conditions/events/people without actually going so far as to actually explicitly portraying them and risking trouble/controversy i.e. clearly, this is a parody of _______ because look, here they're a cat and therefore it's not them! The disadvantage is that, well, the metaphysics of the world tends to get trickier when you've got walking talking animals alongside humans, and not everybody is into having cartoon animals in their otherwise 'real' fiction. But this shouldn't matter, since either way I leave anybody else who does get involved in my fictional stuff somewhat free to determine whether anything that happens in my fiction actually carries over to theirs.
The way I circumvent any potential incompatibility is to control the conditions within the fiction should anybody else get involved, or clarify whether I can appropriate certain things. An example of the former is the BSLL (still this forum's only dedicated 'story in a tournament'), in which I made sure almost everything was wrapped up so the users who got involved could determine what effects, if any, this had on their own fictions, if they had any, especially because frankly, that story turned out ridiculous. An example of the latter was my asking if I could rejig the calendar of sillyworld's AMWEC for my own purposes to attempt to reflect real world motorsport conditions, like having the Melbourne race be tucked into the same race weekend as the real-world F1 and V8SC series, and spreading the events out over the course of the whole year in my own calendar, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't affect anybody else's separate interpretation significantly... apart from certain parts of the commentary, of which I know you (Racer13) were playing a big part, because let's face it, I'm a Melbourne resident, I can hear the racing at Albert Park from where I live, and I'd be kind of unhappy if I could hear the AMWEC kicking off at 5am in the morning
I do try to incorporate the results of my various tournament participations into my company storyline. This is why I created several different companies: so I didn't clutter up my very limited timeline with all these models that had no relation to my company's very narrow brand image. Leo's ATCC series from way back, while modified in some aspects (namely the date), is getting a similar treatment in my fictional timeline and actually plays a pivotal role in the development of my company.
I'm well aware that there are a lot of potential tensions and clashes which we're glossing over. I think we'd go insane if we tried to iron every single one of them out, but certainly we should discuss it so we don't trip up unexpectedly.