In a game, through play, you make your own story, personal to you, with a meaning personal to you.
MMOs, being games, are driven by player actions. Narrative removes meaning from action. Offering three, four, or five different endings still removes meaning. Your gameplay experience is running on rails that are all going in the same direction, and switching tracks doesn’t change that.
MMOs should be richly-featured enough that they don’t need imposed narrative; events can unfold as a result of player action and interaction, taking individual players’ personal experiences into uncharted waters. Players shouldn’t merely get the chance to redirect the narrative, they should get the chance to define it.
The answer is that people are individuals. Some things are incredibly important to them, but not to anyone else (or at least not to many other people). In playing a game, a player can cause events to occur that might not even impinge on the consciousness of the majority, but which are a major experience to that one person. They don’t even have to be a major experience, they can be a minor experience that the player is using as a building block to construct a more meaningful story in their mind. That story may well be garbage to anyone else, but it’s not to the player concerned. They did what they did in the game because it generated (or is working towards precipitating) an event that is a continuation of the unique causal chain the player is assembling, extrapolating, appropriating, honing, and personalizing.
Games, as systems, allow players to experiment with events, picking from them the ones that make the best story for them, which will lead to the further stories that are best for them. An overall, plot-driven series of events can also do this, but by necessity it’s offering a general rather than a specific story. Games allow people to weave these plots into their own story—the one that is arising from the gameplay they are manipulating.
Games are machines for creating stories. Play them, and your imagination will construct ones that work for you.
Everyone likes stories, but they like their own stories most of all.
Games don’t generate meaning. Players and designers generate meaning. Games are the objects or tools from and through which meaning is generated, but it’s the people who generate the meaning.
The Real is Imaginary
In the real world there is nothing except subatomic particles. It’s only because you view those as collecting to form energy and matter, and interpret particular configurations of energy and matter to be “objects,” that you can say a particular thing—a house, for example—“exists” in the real world.
In virtual worlds, objects are emergent consequences of the interaction of computer code and data. People ascribe meaning to these configurations, just as they do to matter/energy in the real world. They recognize that there is a difference between this kind of object and the kind they deal with normally, so they call them “virtual objects.”
Ultimately, though, the “objectness” of anything (whether real or virtual) is nothing more than a construct of the mind.
Richard Bartle, MMOs From The Inside Out