People love points. It seems like there are points involved in everything now. Use an airline enough, and you'll get points towards free miles or what have you. Talk on the phone enough, and you'll get points towards free minutes or something like that. Buy enough stuff at pretty much any big retailer and you'll earn points for future purchases. Shoot enough people in the face in pretty much any multiplayer game made in the past year, and you'll earn points. So, considering mathematics is a very polarizing subject that many (if they can help it) won't choose to continue with after high-school, why do people love points so much?

Although I'm sure someone much more qualified than I to talk about such things on an actual scientific level might be able to reach a very different conclusion, the reason I have found for people's love of points is simple: they put the money, time, or effort into something (even if it's driving a few miles to the closest electronics store to buy a $20 pair of earbuds), and receive an immediate reward. And even if said reward doesn't amount to much, it triggers something in our reptilian brains that makes us feel as if we've accomplished something, or that we're working towards something, and we want to keep on accruing those points for further rewards.

To make it clear, what I'm about to say isn't another ridiculous attempt to vilify the Call of Duty series or its creators, but once Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released in November, 2007, the points craze met multiplayer shooters. From there on out players would be hard pressed to find a multiplayer game where a number didn't flash on screen every time they performed a significant action. Sure Kill/Death ratios and more basic points systems had existed, but Call of Duty 4 pioneered that sense of grinding points for purposes of advancement or receiving rewards that had until that point, only really been seen in role-playing games. A simple '+10' would show up every time a player killed somebody, or completed an objective, and it proved to be as oddly, senselessly mesmerizing as any real-life rewards program.

And finally we've arrived at my argument: the "Points Game", as I like to call it, is ruining multiplayer shooters. In multiplayer FPS's of yore, namely games such as Counter-Strike, or Battlefield, your reward was in your working with team mates to triumph over the opposing force. Although having a nice Kill/Death ratio gave players some bragging rights, it was victory that they aimed for above all. In more recent titles, when you get points towards advancement with your every action, victory takes a backseat to amassing points. Players greedy for points will often abandon all teamplay, lone-wolfing it to gain as many points as they possibly can before the round ends. Say you're playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2's Rush mode. There's one crate left, and you're on the defending team. Why bother actively defending so that you might win the match when you're rewarded more for just going out on your own sniping anything that moves? Points make players change their strategies, making them become less, and less part of a team.

If a player killing a ton of enemies helps their team win a match, that should be their reward. The meta-game of advancing through ranks, and gaining access to new content through points systems has to stop if multiplayer shooters are to be fun again. Multiplayer gaming is about fun competition, a concept that becomes obsolete when players are rewarded for their every action. They become less focused on the outcomes of individual matches, instead caring more about a meaningless sense of advancement. Multiplayer shooters have pushed aside friendly (or not so friendly) competition, and teamwork in favor of numbers, and that is very sad indeed.