Online multiplayer- What keeps us playing?

It's Winter Break, so I've been playing a lot of video games lately. I've been getting back into TF2, (nobody ever quits for more than a few months to a year, tops.) trying to get good at Chivalry, and trying to do something I haven't gotten bored of in Minecraft. I decided that since I have good internet at my house I'd play some Battlefield 4 as well. After getting turned into swiss cheese by an ACE 23 assault rifle for the fifty-thousandth time I had a thought. Why am I playing this? I've never been very good at multiplayer games, but they're most of what I play. What exactly is keeping me going despite my glaring lack of skill?

As it turns out, there are a lot of different ways that multiplayer games hook us in. (Disclaimer: I haven't played MMO's since I stopped playing RuneScape when I was 14, so I'm not going to talk about them. These are all action!) I'm going to go over some of the reasons I've stuck with these online multiplayer games.

Battlefield 3, I mean, 4.
Shooters today seem to be less about shooting things and more about unlocking things to shoot things with. The fact that you have to dedicate playing time "grinding" in order to unlock more content means it takes a while until you're able to enjoy all the content. This sounds as if the developers are intentionally keeping content away from players, but it's not all bad. I should say I'm a real sucker for unlockables, having thrown away 300-400 hours on Battlefield 3 and who knows how much on CoD: Black Ops, getting service stars, attachments, and generally playing my way to larger arbitrary numbers.

Speaking of attachments...

1000 rounds per minute, but you can't see. Better unlock a scope!

Unlockable attachments! Who doesn't love playing a first person shooter in which they start with something as crappy as Battlefield 3's FAMAS (right) and have to work to make your weapons more usable? It does however make having a cool, customized loadout more fun, because you've put time working on it. That time wasn't the playing time you were looking for, though. It was work. Is it worth it? That's up to you.

Chivalry: All war, no flair.
The counterarguments to Battlefield's system are games like Chivalry, in which there's not much to unlock and even less that carries over from one round to the next. I'm not going to go as far as saying that Chivalry's gameplay is so much more fun than that of a shooter like Battlefield, but it is different in more ways than just guns vs. swords. Chivalry's combat is hard, frustratingly so. For those of you who are not familiar with Chivalry's swordplay, it's almost exactly like the way the Black Knight fights in Monty Python's Holy Grail. If it's so hard, then why is it still (somewhat) popular? It's because, though there's not much of an unlock system, what does improve over time is the player's skill. While many people find this self-improvement rewarding and exciting, some might see the lack of progression repetitive. "It's just the same thing over and over, round after round!" they say. The game's the same, but the players keep growing, learning, and changing.

Team Fortress 2: The Superstar

Released in October of 2007, Team Fortress 2 has seen over six years of popularity and four hundred updates to date. In the beginning, there were no unlockable weapons, and not even any hats, let alone miscellaneous cosmetic items like beards and shirts. Four hundred updates later, there are so many items that you have to search through 74 (and constantly rising) catalog pages to find that specific weapon you want. This is where Valve's marketing genius really shines. The updates have not only added content to the main game, but they have added an entirely new and addictive dimension on top of it. A quick search through the server list found that about over a quarter of servers is specifically for trading. Valve started a real-currency economy with the introduction of the Mann Co. Store in September of 2010, and more recently has facilitated player-to-player transactions through the Community Market. The TF2 economy has attracted collectors and even speculators, (though don't expect to make any money, Valve takes 5% of all Market transactions) turning what used to be a first-person-shooter into a first-person-hat-trading-simulator. With more and more ways to personalize your precious loot, one of TF2's main draws is definitely it's ever-changing plethora of items. And hats. Mostly hats.

But what if you're not into practicing your video gaming skills, or unlocking some purely cosmetic change to your loadout? What could possibly keep you coming back to a game that doesn't offer a chance to do either? This one is a little more personal yet a lot less specific.

Minecraft: Connecting with a community?
I started playing Minecraft back in the 2010 Alpha days, and now that it's 2014 it's starting to get old. No, adding horses doesn't freshen up the game enough to keep me interested in single player. What keeps me playing Minecraft isn't the game but the people playing it. The Hatventures server is full of awesome people, many of which spend a lot of time just hanging out with the community. I find that playing Minecraft is more about this hanging out than the actual game, which is interesting because the community is based around the game. It's a social thing that's hard to define, but it's definitely a valuable part of the world of gaming.

So what about you? What keeps you playing the games you do?
Go ahead and use that comment section!