How do you view gameplay as a story element?

One of my favorite phrases is “ludonarrative dissonance” and I  often find myself musing on it. The idea of the constant push/pull of gameplay elements and narrative elements in a game potentially causing a disconnect in the gameplay fascinates me, and I’m even more interested in the ways gameplay elements can actually be used to feed the game’s narrative. One example in World of Warcraft is the lore that’s been built up over the years about Spirit Healers.

The Spirit Healer is the means by which your character comes back to life after being killed in World of Warcraft, and for years it was simply accepted as pure gameplay — they didn’t want people to stop playing the game because a bear had gotten lucky in Ashenvale. Death had its drawbacks — you often had to repair your gear and had resurrection sickness that made it harder to adventure for ten minutes or so — but it wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t part of the game world per se — Anduin Lothar didn’t just run back to his body after Doomhammer and his orcs had killed the old Lion of Azeroth. It was a pure part of the game’s mechanics, an element of pure play without a story behind it.

But it didn’t stay that way. Over the years, a few tantalizing mentions of them in the game’s lore — one was romantically linked to the Blue Dragon Azuregos, for example — and the presence of entities that resembled them like the Val’kyr that served the Lich King piled up.

Then, in Shadowlands, we discovered that the Spirit Healers were in fact Kyrian, members of the faction that went into the borderlands between the worlds of the living and the dead to escort the dead to the Shadowlands. Only in the case of the Spirit Healers, for various reasons including potentially the ultimate thwarting of Zovaal and our role in defending existence from all sorts of threats, these Kyrian decided not to ferry us to the Shadowlands but instead to return us to life.

As a result, something that was once just a game mechanic was now an entrenched part of the game’s story, and thus rather than ludonarrative dissonance, what we have is ludonarrative harmonics. A game mechanic that also tells a story. So what do you think? Do you care if the game’s mechanics serve to help tell the story or set the mood? Would you rather gameplay elements always just be accepted as such, like with XP and Character Levels, things that only exist so that we as players know how powerful we are and which the characters we play have never heard of? How do you feel about gameplay in the game’s story?