Competition gets personal. Competition gets people riled up and sometimes people get angry. Being a gracious loser and a humble winner is tough. Being a bad sportsman is a common and easy pattern of behavior to fall into, and the Fighting Game and Smash communities have created different types of defenses against salty players who can’t hold their Ls.
No Johns
In the Smash Bros community, legend says there was once a guy named John who had an excuse for everything. “I didn’t sleep well last night!” “The CRT was tilted away from me!” “The sun was in my eyes!” “My dog ate my inputs!” Naturally this wasn’t very polite to his opponents.
This eponymous John was so infamous that eventually, when people would make excuses for why they lost, people started to say, “No Johns!” It became such a big meme that over a decade later, Reggie Fils-Aime would quote it in a promotion for Smash 4.
No Johns helped to promote an environment where, rather than complaining, people would focus on the game and improve. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a funny and certainly helpful.
Scrubs
Scrub is a term that has found its way across gaming, usually referring to players that are bad. “Git gud, Scrub!” “I remember when I was a Scrub, but I’ve improved a lot!” In the Fighting Game Community, Scrub has a special meaning, with a degree of nuance. The FGC weaponizes the term to a certain degree, in order to protect themselves against bad sportsmanship.
A Scrub is someone who doesn’t take responsibility for losing, and more broadly, isn’t playing to win with everything at their disposal. A Scrub is someone who moralizes about their play style and other people’s play styles, instead of accepting that a game is just a game and everything provided to you is fair play. Scrub isn’t a type of person so much as it’s a mentality, a state of mind.
A Scrub is someone who will tell you that you play the game dishonorably, and if you only played “fair” you would never be able to beat them. Whether it’s spamming moves, “abusing” combos, or picking a “braindead” character. If you use a strategy they can’t deal with, they’ll get mad about it and blame you rather than themselves.
The FGC employs a tactic of naming and shaming Scrubs, or calling out “scrubby” behavior, as a way of curtailing this type of bad sportsmanship. Nobody wants to play against a sore loser, and ostracizing sore losers (or sore winners) from the community might not be the nicest thing to do, but it certainly helps keep toxicity out of offline events.
A funny side-effect of this FGC definition of Scrub is that a lot of Scrubs will call other people “Scrubs” (bad at the game because they use a “cheap” tactic) without realizing that they’re the Scrub (Moralizing about choice of tactic). Sadly, we even see high level players fall into Scrub Mentality sometimes when they get hit by something they don’t like.
The FGC Nod
Alongside the tradition of denouncing Scrubs, the FGC also has a proud tradition of acknowledging when we’re beat. The opposite of a Scrub Quote is the FGC nod, a silent acknowledgement of “Yeah, you got me. Good job. I gotta learn from this.”
One of the funniest clips in recent memory is KBrad going, “I’mma block this wack-ass mixup” and cracking up with joy and laughter when he eats shit. (The mixup is: A jump that looks like it will cross-up. A teleport dash backwards in midair, so it won’t cross-up. THEN an EX Whirlwind Kick that suddenly and unexpectedly crosses up anyway!)
Playing to Win
So how do you avoid being a Scrub? The answer is, you gotta play to win.
“But I am playing to win! These assholes won’t let me win because they keep picking the top tiers and hitting me with the cheap shit!”
If you were playing to win, you’d be using the cheap shit and picking the top tiers! You have just as much access to those options as they do!
“But I don’t want the game to be about spamming moves that beat everything else!”
If that is genuinely true about this game, then go play another game which doesn’t have overpowered moves.
“But every game has cheap moves!”
Can this really be true? If you think this is true, then isn’t it more likely that you’re just hitting the same skill wall in every game, rather than every game being genuinely made wrong? If you watch high level play, are they using all or most of the characters’ moves? Are they using a wide range of characters?
If your opponent is spamming a move, you’re spamming mistakes. A lot of moves require you to answer with a specific set of options. If you can’t identify those and do them on command, you’re going to keep losing to them. Fighting games are about paying attention to your opponent and doing what beats what they’re doing.
There aren’t any medals for picking low tier characters or avoiding “cheap” moves, there are only medals for winning, and you can choose to accept that, or stop competing. Sometimes, what’s important in a game isn’t what you expect when you first get into it. A game can be very different casually and competitively.
Playing to Win means accepting the game for what it is, and making choices that set you up to win, rather than handicapping yourself right out the gate with preconceptions and moralizing.
Patch Culture
Unfortunately, the modern internet connected age of balance patches has eroded some of our values. When a game doesn’t get patched for a decade and is played offline on hardware that’s older than some of the attendees, it’s a lot easier to go, “Yeah, accept this for what it is, or get bodied”
When a game gets yearly balance patches, it’s easy to go, “This game would be more fair if that thing I hate wasn’t in it!” And that’s how a lot of people, even high level players, can end up a little bit scrubby at times.
Does this mean it’s never okay to talk about a game’s faults? Of course not. Criticizing games for their faults is an entirely valid pursuit, and it’s a good thing for players to speak up to developers about what they think could be better. A lot of games have improved for this.
The critical thing is, when criticizing a game, you need to have some emotional distance. You need to determine, “Is this just a me problem, or is this an everyone problem?” It’s also okay to have preferences about the kinds of games you like, and what you’d prefer the game was like, as long as you’re capable of separating what’s good for you from what’s good for everyone else.
I don’t really like Mortal Kombat for a lot of the way those games are made, but I have to acknowledge that there is a competitive community that appreciates them and they are not completely broken as games (most of the time).
Sometimes you wear your “game designer” hat and sometimes you wear your “competitor” hat and you need to be careful not to mix them up or you’ll end up mistaking your personal obstacles to improvement for faults in the game’s design. That’s the moment when you become a Scrub. Even though I don’t like Mortal Kombat, I have to accept that it’s a good game series for all the same things I value in other fighting games.
Patches are better than not having patches, we just need to also accept the nature of patches, that we’ll have to alter our strategies as the game shifts beneath us, and we should accept the game for what it is while we have it instead of praying to the developers for something different.
Dark Souls
Okay, I can’t talk about Scrubs without talking about “git gud”
“Git Gud” started as a defense against bad sportsmanship, much like how Scrub is used in Fighting Games. When Dark Souls was brought to PC, it was exposed to many new players, especially those who weren’t used to playing with a gamepad instead of mouse and keyboard (It was in the middle of the awkward transition period where console controllers began to work on PC, and the KBM controls for the game were NOT good.)
Many PC players began to complain about Dark Souls, but frequently for reasons that indicated that they didn’t make an honest effort to understand the game, or that they just couldn’t deal with the animations and the amount of health you’re given. They started saying the game was “artificial difficulty” (“It’s not really hard! I just get hit by stuff I wasn’t paying attention to and die too soon!”) You could spend hours debunking this massive variety of claims about the game from people that don’t examine their environment or read messages, or just say, “git gud scrub”
Is this the most productive conversation? Maybe not. But they also weren’t the most productive complaints, and I really cannot understate how plentiful they were during that time period.
Over time this has mutated into a less positive usage, where anyone asking legitimately for help is met with, “git gud scrub” instead of genuine advice. Dark Souls has developed its own cult of gamers devoted to how “hard” it is compared to other games, attempting to drive people off for the sake of driving them off. Perhaps the people being told “git gud” got good and felt like it was their turn to inflict pain onto others?
At the core of it, I think “git gud” can still be a positive message. It’s a reminder to Play to Win, and accept the form of the problem, instead of relying on preconceptions about what you think the problem should be.
Beyond Fighting Games
I think that a lot of other competitive gaming communities would be well served if they came to understand this definition for Scrub. I think being able to articulate and identify this pattern of bad sportsmanship is something that has made the Fighting Game Community incredibly awesome. It’s part of why fighting game players feel like they’re part of a family, where other competitive game players are stuck with such incredible toxicity.
Playing to Win, acknowledging the true shape of a problem and making choices on the same level as it, is an incredibly powerful strategy for everyday life. It’s something I try to embody in my life and in my writing (even if I can get a bit salty about my shortcomings and circumstances beyond my control sometimes!)
Someday, maybe, we’ll be able to toss out the Scrubs and insist on No Johns, but until then we’ll just have to keep calling them like we see them and keep our heads cool.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 
The scrub example that came to me most readily regarding Dark Souls, and Elden Ring, has more to do with the way the series’ culture has led to a tendency to elevate certain self-imposed challenges (eg. no shields, no magic, no summons) as being the baseline “true” way to play, with everything else being some kind of debasement of the game itself. I’m sorry, but if you’re mad that you took 100 tries to beat Malenia with nothing but a straight sword, and someone else beat Malenia first try with Tiche, a Barricade Shielded greatshield, and/or Comet Azur, you’re a scrub. Not for going for the fight with nothing but your wits, but for refusing to accept that doing so is a challenge above and beyond what the game itself demands, and that the “cheap” ways are exactly what the game is asking for.
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Alright, funny enough, I actually take the opposite stance on that. Those are single player games, they’re not a competition. You aren’t battling another player who is also putting in work to beat you. You’re trying to overcome a static pre-defined challenge. That means that if someone can overcome a more difficult self-imposed challenge than you can, they’re the better player. I recently played through God of War, and a PAIN run (No upgrades, no health or magic drops from chests, Very Hard Mode) is definitely beyond my ability, and anyone who can complete one is a better player than me. The standard is literally the opposite of competitive multiplayer and with good reason.
The Soulsborne games are RPGs, which means you can grind for souls for 5000 hours and get to the max level and trivialize every fight in the game, and to be clear, I don’t think this is a good thing about the Soulsborne series, or any RPG. I think it’s better when games can be designed to provide a more static challenge, in part because that means we can’t accidentally trivialize the game for ourselves.
I don’t think the cheap ways are what the game is asking for. I think enemies are designed to be threatening at melee combat range with only one player character. I think enemies are tuned to do a certain amount of damage to you, and to be defeated in a certain number of hits. And these numbers can be fudged a bit, because it’s an RPG, but I don’t think you should be beating bosses in one or two hits.
You could absolutely summon your friends, and other mobs and have them beat the enemies and bosses for you, while you sit around, sort of like this overwatch clip, but like, why are you playing this game if you’re not actively engaged with it in any way? If I did this in a multiplayer game, it’s the other person’s fault for not learning how to beat it. A single player game can NEVER learn how to beat it. A single player game is fixed the way it is, and you can totally cheese it, but a skilled live opponent won’t LET YOU cheese them.
I think that with single player games that players should try to push themselves. I’m currently playing through Elden Ring with a big crappy sword and no health upgrades. I’ve been doing this small tradition of mine since Demon’s Souls, in part because I heard that game was inspired a lot by Berserk, which I was a big fan of way back then.
I’m not proposing that everyone does challenge runs, just that if you want to have the best experience with the game, you should avoid summons, play a melee build of some kind, and not spec into some crazy one-shot nonsense. I think that the desire to prove to others that you are the hardest core dark souls player is dumb, but I think the community maintains these basic standards in part so that we’re all on the same page.
In PvP, go nuts. Anything is fair game in PvP.
The big difference here is, in PvP, it’s about who can use the best tools the best, and in PvE, it’s about experiencing the challenges that everyone else is, or putting yourself up to a bigger challenge to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the game’s design.
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Oh, huh, that is not what I expected. For the record I didn’t use spirit ashes myself (more due to forgetting they existed than any kind of opposition to them), and cleared every Remembrance boss in both the base game and DLC. I suppose I found myself understanding and enjoying Elden Ring more when I realized it may have designed more like the Armored Core games, since ER seems to take notes from its design philosophy of incorporating tweaking your loadout to fit the challenge, given the power of talismans, easily swapped weapon arts and damage types for basic weapons and the lowest resource investment ever for boss weapons, a seemingly increased emphasis on elemental weaknesses, and even some boss-specific counter items, all coming together to give the player options to optimize themselves for each boss in turn.
I just remember seeing a lot of people trying to play Elden Ring like it’s Dark Souls (melee only/focus, sometimes no shield, not bothering with defensive jumping or taking advantage of the higher effective stamina to run more in combat, not using the stance break system, favouring bashing their head into a boss rather than exploring and coming back, let alone any of the spirit ash mechanics) and then getting upset that the bosses aren’t the slower Dark Souls bosses, but are instead flipping around everywhere and not giving them a chance to breathe, not realizing that regardless of the existence of spirit ashes they are supposed to be finding little openings during boss attacks to exploit by mindful repositioning, rather than the boss being slower and plodding and them being able to win based purely on roll timing, and then complaining that the bosses are bullshit because spirit summons are in the game (often in hour-long video essays), instead of realizing that the bosses are as hard as they are because, unlike Demon’s and Dark Souls, but somewhat like Dark Souls 3, you don’t really have a runback anymore. Thus bosses have to be more focused units of challenge to get the same effect as in older games where you had to trek through a level and also beat the boss all without dying. That’s the attitude I found particularly scrubby when it came to approaching the changes made from Dark Souls in Elden Ring’s systems.
Honestly, I wish they’d either dropped spirit summons or made them a core part of the game, something you had to manage and command in some kind of hybrid RPG/real time tactics game in order to use them properly. Thematically it ties into the whole “uniting the land as the new Elden Lord” thing, and would mean that they don’t feel like this tacked-on afterthought of a system that distracts people from the stuff they need to do to learn and adapt.
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