In a Noir kind of Mood

So H felt like watching a couple of movies the other night, and to my wonder surprise and glee
brings out two movies she "hasn't seen yet"... Asphalt Jungle and Kiss Me Deadly. Woo!
So, clearly I realized I was in love with this girl. Lucky, since we're married.
All this Noir talk had gotten her in the mood to see some great gritty flicks.
You may have noticed the "Quote of the Week" update...one of the little gems from Kiss Me Deadly
(Velda seems to get the great lines).

So I wanted to post something...not a "Review" of the film, but a pervasive concept I think needs to be in my noir mmo. And that is "escape".

*Spoiler Alert*
In one of the endings of Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and Velda (Maxine Cooper) get out of the house a few seconds before it erupts in flames... and there they are struggling in the surf and the credits roll. The problem is, the 'box of doom' that has been opened is connected to 'The Manhattan Project', 'Los Alamos' (This is a great line too where Wesley Addy says 'I'm gonna say a few words...they're just a bunch of letters', etc).
This means they haven't escaped anything...the whole western seaboard hasn't escaped. L.A., San Francisco, San Diego...over. The effort to escape the house is of course entirely fruitless.
The other ending has them merely limp out of the room before the explosion/The End.
The first ending is better because it embodies the fruitless struggle of humanity...we try as hard as we can to scrape by...and for what? As Jim Morrison says, "No one gets out of here alive".

So how does this relate to my noir mmo idea?
Obviously we can't have people die at the end of every mission.
But maybe there's a way to have NPCs provide heavy existential motivation. For Mike Hammer, it was the demise of his good friend Nick (Va VaVoom!) the local mechanic (who seems an inspiration for Roman Bellic, your cousin in GTA IV).
I think NPCs have come a long way in providing emotional motivations for the player...for single-player games. Not sure yet if mmo's quite pull it off.