There are many reasons why people enjoy watching or playing sports. Mostly, it's because they're drunk. Beyond that, there are things like big plays and big scoring plays.

In American football, the two main scoring plays are touchdowns and field-goals. The former awards 7 points (with the PAT), and the latter 3. Touchdowns can be scored at any time (which can be similar to scoring a knockdown in boxing).

In boxing, the big plays are knockdowns and knockouts.

In baseball, the big plays are home-runs (which vary between 1-4 points).

In basketball, there are no big plays.

In soccer or hockey, every score is a big play.

In Quake, there are no big plays in the sense of scoring more than 1 point per frag or in the sense of every frag necessarily being of great significance. There are big plays, but, most people would not recognize them. A big play in Quake would be something like killing a 200/200 opponent when you only have 100/0.

The reason to have big-play potential in a sport, is to make it more interesting or exciting. To make it so, no matter how dire the outcome appears, there is still some hope that the losing player/team can still win. While it would be difficult to add big-play potential in Quake, the same basic thing can be achieved through the map system I recently went over. By putting the low-scoring maps first, and the high-scoring maps last, a player could conceivably lose the first 4 maps by a total of 20 points, and then win the 5th game by 21 points, thereby winning the game. Big-map potential is essentially the same as big-play potential, plus it is simple enough for anyone to understand and requires no programming expenses.

Without big-play potential, a game fails to bring out the best in its players and fails to entertain a broad base of fans.