Unfortunate side effect of posting from my phone.
Plus I appear to have some kind of weird specific dyslexia around homophones, despite knowing better than most which to use I invariably choose the wrong one when not paying attention.
I tend to agree.
Authors (as in people who write books) can on occasion get it write but I don't think I've ever come across a game that really did. At this point game writing (particularly for RPGs as you mention) just isn't seen as important enough to spend the time and money on making it interesting.

It's one of the reasons I tend to base a lot of my ideas on real world myths for any book or game ideas I have, as it gives it a little more depth and realism then what I can pluck out of my own head.

I was just describing the typical Mario game (at least from what I remember). They do in fact include a damsel in distress. I think "You must defeat hordes of enemy creatures" is more a part of a gameplay description rather than a plot, though.

*shrugs*
I dunno, perhaps having lived in Egypt, a country steeped in real-world mythology, with a tourism industry heavily dependent on that mythology, so that it was always the focus, and being pushed, inoculated me to fascination with mythology, and not just the ancient Egyptian kind. My eyes glaze over...perhaps its because to me its like reading the glossary of a fantasy novel without reading the story itself.

Examples?

Well, at least you aren't the only one to make this mistake. As I mentioned, such a mistake occurs in Kirby Super Star. "The Cutter can cut anything in it's path."

I don't dislike lore. I dislike poorly written exposition - which is what passes for lore in most games.

The Elder Scrolls games are the worst. All these hundreds and hudreds of books all over the game world that are all poorly written. Just tiresome. At least there's no requirement to read them.

The Mass Effect games put everything in a codex which you can access or not according to your whim. Better written than The Elder Scrolls books. Partly I think that's because they are written in Encyclopedia style or in News Style. This works pretty well. Makes it easier to skim and get the "headlines" so to speak.

My favorite, though, are games that present you with an accomplished world and don't present you with all the lore as exposition. For instance, Van Helsing, the ARPG, mostly doesn't bother with written or spoken exposition. Mostly. There is some speechifying by characters that gets tiresome. But for the most part the world is presented as is. I'm sure there was a lot of lore generated by the designers in order to keep the world coherent, but the player doesn't need all that. The effect is that my imagination is stimulated by the hints and atmosphere and oddities, rather than being lulled to sleep by the catalogue of lists and names and dates.

Tolkien is who I blam for the idea that you need to explicate all this lore. I confess that when I read the Lord of the Rings books I skip over the histories and Elvish songs and ballads. Bollocks. Get on with the tale. And I can't get through The Silmarillion - which is 2/3 the kind of lore I skip. But I love Tolkien otherwise.

Deus Ex is one game which confounds the usual practice of in-game lore. It has books and data files littered about the world which you don't have to read. But unlike fantasy games where all that lore is trying to build up a grand history spanning millenia - in Deus Ex, the lore just expands the conspiracy theories until you are even less sure of what's going on. Even so, I find it tiresome, and I skip it.

Cheers!

Hehehe. Pun intended?

It depends on how the lore is communicated. If the developers are going for a "show, don't tell" approach, it'll grab hold of my brain anyway. But when developers think a credible universe starts with 200 pages of bland text in a stupid menu almanach, they're sorely mistaken.

It also depends on the reason the developers are creating "lore" as well. If they're creating it as a background to the specific proceedings of the story, sure. If they're just pouring it in because the authors had a bit too much free time, no thanks.

"Care" is of course expressed through knowledge. For example, Beyond Good & Evil has a very concise background and very concise narrative, but still no one seems to remember it. I walk through swamps of supposed fans who are unable to interpret the new BG&E2 trailers, and I read a whole lot of E3 reporting that's just "nope, you're wrong" for me. For a game that was supposedly this beloved, I think there should be more people you could quiz on the most elementary of its lore.

<_< >_>

Let's say yes....

This covered it for me too. I used to look for games with an interesting narrative and then I had a period of amtosphere but now I'm all about the lore and background story (particularly for games done in medias res).

It obviously depends on the game, but the only lore I can remember which truly fascinated me was subtly introduced with the following line, read in a deep baritone voice: "I know you, Raziel. You are worthy."

That being said, I tend to enjoy any kind of lore a game provides as long as it's not:
a) Fed to you with a spoon - you should be able to choose to explore it at your own pace or ignore most of it, as you will
b) Presented in the form of pages upon pages of written text that you have to read ingame - if I wanted to read a novel, I wouldn't be playing a computer game, now would I?
c) Superficial

Oh, that reminds me of an exception: Planescape Torment is so full of lore conveyed by text that in any other game I'd probably have been really bored or annoyed with it, but when I first played it I had no clue what Planescape was and I found it so intriguing to learn about the setting that I didn't mind that at all. It's still D&D but so much more interesting to me than Forgotten Realms. In most other RPGs though I often feel like I'm reading the same old stories just with fancy new names.

I appreciate when a game's lore has a fairly unique vision behind it and is presented with restraint and brevity. It gets painful when you're playing something that is just a bunch of rehashed fantasy/sci-fi gobbledygook and the game starts drowning you in text and dialogue about it because the writers just can't resist showing off how much they've thought about their cliches.

I would.

So, to answer the OP, I care for it quite a lot. And I'm a reader, will look for every in game book, item description and what not I can find. Well-written dialogue is also a big plus of course. Games with great gameplay but little lore can also be nice, and games can be harmed by having lore elements included if they're bad, as opposed to not having them, assuming the gameplay can compensate, but between a game with great gameplay and average story and lore and one with great story and lore and average gameplay, I'll take the latter. Definitely find it more memorable for one.
Since it was mentioned already, you know what I remember from Morrowind right away, without even trying? Finding the Library of Vivec and spending a full hour just forgetting about the rest of the game and reading the new stuff found there. And The Real Barenziah. Also, the woman giving you a quest to track down the guy who robbed her because she fell in love with him. Not lore, but story element, since otherwise it's just a plain quest. Other than that, I remember the darn annoying constant respawns and the limited cash of shopkeepers not letting me sell off all stuff properly, which (respawns mainly, of course) were what made me give up on it (then try again, then give up again).
Don't think I need to mention PS:T, was already mentioned anyway. Gameplay, just passable, but great due to all I could read in it. This may still be the best piece of writing in a game.
Also, for another example, while at the time I did keep trying to play RTSs even though I sucked at them, can say I got more interested to keep playing Starcraft once Kerrigan's story kicked in and it gave me something to follow. Wouldn't touch SC2, but watched let's plays to follow that to the end. (But this may not be what this is asking about, being story.)
Even recently, since I just finished Ember, took the books in the game as a high point. And was surprised that the skill of those who wrote them wasn't reflected in the game's story as well, oddly.

So, basically, it doesn't make a game and it doesn't make up for really bad gameplay, but, along with the overall atmosphere, it can make an otherwise average game quite memorable, and an otherwise good game truly outstanding.

Short answer: Fairly, as long as its presented in a fashion that isn't tropetastic, cliched, or highly derivative.

Long answer: I'm going to use the writing/lore on the original Mass Effect versus its later entries as an example. Drew Karpyshyn took a very vague approach to lore in the original, simply providing facts about the world that you exist in, its technology, its races, flora/fauna/worlds, and a bit on how you get there, provided by database files and entries that you never actually had to read. He took the same approach with the Reapers, preferring to keep them as this mysterious big bad that was more myth than anything else, and presented it as a sort of quasi boogieman story.

This is the approach that I prefer, a minimalist, but practical approach to lore, that has a useful application in the world your character inhabits, nor does it fall into fake deep territory. This also places a higher value in character interaction, as it then makes you have to explore, talk to NPCs, etc, to put more pieces of the story/history puzzle together. Nor did I mind doing so.

This does place emphasis on making NPC dialogues be presented in interesting ways, and making sure that the character writers are actually, y'know, good. I won't say that the original ME knocked it out of the park on every character, but they did a solid enough job that it just worked.

Later iterations felt like they threw the baby out with the bath water, after spending all this time building up the Reapers, yadayadayada, culminating in a story arc that could have been plagiarized from Star Control 3, or any other similar game during the sci-fi adventure boom era. The original found a way to present their lore in way that was balanced with other core design elements, and each subsequent iteration found ways to flub that up.

This is one of the major reasons I've become less and less of a story gamer as the years have gone by, because of writer incompetence, and the insistence of designers on copying every shitty Hollywood method of application out there.

Don't get me wrong, if a game comes out tomorrow with lore that's both interesting, has applied usage, and is well written in both character arcs, dialogues, and conclusions, I'd be all over it, but it's a pretty rare beast in modern times.

I care about lore as long as it is tied to game narrative. Good world building means that all (or at least most important) things I meet in the game have their explaination.

Why some castle stands in this place and not that? Why do I have to fight this guy, but not some other one? Why my character's inventory is lager than it could be in real life? Why sometimes people are ressurrected after death and sometimes not?

All those "why?" questions good lore must answer. Otherwise it is not a good lore.

You have trouble with the nine, but i bet you'd have little trouble with the daedra. Now, if i'm right, you'll find one particular member of the nine to be interesting enough to look much, much deeper. The problem is, there's very little lore on the nine, outside of Talos, the Shezzarine (reincarnation of Shezzar/Shor/Lorkhan). The other 8 are pretty much bare. And if you can understand the lore of Lorkhan, then you'll find very quickly that Skyrim is way more lore intensive than people give credit: we're finally seeing the misinformation of the Altmer playing out, because the whole basis of Skyrim is about the long-standing Altmer belief that elves (especially atlmer) are demi-gods that got dethroned because of Lorkhan (who has had many mortal forms, including Talos). The split between "the elves" (ie, Altmer, as the other elves who cared all died out, and the other remaining elves don't follow this idea) and mankind has everything to do with whether the aedra (which are more numerous than the 8) were willing in the creation of the world or not. The elves believe that Lorkhan tricked their ancestors (like Akatosh/Auri El) into giving of their power to create a world, while mankind believes that the divines willingly chose to sacrifice their power. So, the Altmer feel that mankind stole their glory and thunder, and that Talos (whom most altmer and mankind are completely unaware is Lorkhan) was a major factor in dethroning them a second time. The really cool part is, the other 8 have never had a problem with Talos worship, and they even are OK with Daedra worship (the deeper you get into the Annuad [creation myth], the more you realize that this whole Aedra are good and Daedra are evil thing is completely wrong, even from a lore perspective). The actual drama of the religion adds way more interesting angles to the overall stories. The Nords (conservatives) are fighting for the rights of mankind, the elves (altmer normally represent japanese, and redguard normally represent arabs, but in this case it's clearly a metaphore for islam) are fighting for religious superiority, and the imperials (lefties) are basically pawns who're trying to get both sides to get along in the interest of peace, but side with the more powerful and more aggressive people (the elves/muslims), since it's easier and "safer" to do so since the other is less likely to fight back (christians are pacifists).

Oh, and Talos is Jesus: Lorkhan is the All-Maker (that the skaal worship), and Talos is a man form of Lorkhan who then reascended to godhood (just like trinitarian christianity). This much might be less interesting, but the sooner you see it (and all the other clues that Talos is Jesus), the easier it is to recognize the obvious smear campaign against Ulfric (and the fact that Bethesda predicted a nobody [Donald Trump] would be the next US presidential nominee), who, if you pay attention to him, is not the bloodthirsty guy that he's painted to be. It also makes it obvious when you find the anti-Talos propaganda and how it's basically non-argument fluff what Bethesda feels about the anti-religious propaganda (regardless of their religious stances). Skyrim is very metaphorical, but to understand it you have to understand the lore.

I think Oblivion tried to be more philosophical, but didn't quite pull it off: Dagon's actually a good guy. Morrowind was very obviously political and philosophical from a metaphorical perspective. The more you read the ingame lore and controversies in the main questline, the more you start to question what you've been told to believe in real life.

However, most people don't know enough of the lore to see how important religion is to the series. The religion has so many metaphores, even down to the conflicts of the various gods, as well as how one suffers for following said Gods (i think Hermeus Mora's questline was pretty self-explanatory in the Dragonborn expansion: blind lust for knowledge will entrap you and destroy you). The religion is pretty unimportant until you start seeing the subliminal messages hidden in quest plots and how they tie into the gods.