Fighters tend to be competitive people. They compete against themselves, they compete against others, and they compete against an abstract standard they’ve set for themselves. How well you compete is measured by keeping score. If you could do fifty crunches in a minute yesterday, then by gum you'd better be able to do fifty-five crunches today. If you score three unblocked kicks on your partner, who only scores two on you, you win. If you set a goal of incorporating more spinning kicks into your sparring, then you darn well better have done some during the last sparring session.
But sometimes it's just a lot of fun to compete without keeping score. Sometimes it's a joy and a delight to simply spar with your best effort and not count the number of unblocked kicks. Most warriors know that you don't always have to keep score.
If you're a competitive person, you probably have lots of ways you keep score. You count the number of degrees you have or the amount of money you make. The more toys you have, the closer you are to winning, right? But, of Course, none of these course, none of these measures really say if you're a good person or not, or whether you're happy or miserable. The score just tells you what the score is. It doesn't mean one person is somehow better than another, except in a particular area being measured on a particular day.