Scrub - Definition and Overview

Scrub has a number of meanings:

• to rub a surface hard, especially with a brush.

• low lying vegetation or an area containing this vegetation. This term is commonly used in New Zealand for the early stages of a regenerating forest (bush), sub-alpine scrub or low-land scrub.

See also: Shrub

• No Scrubs is the name of a song by TLC, from their 1999 album FanMail.

• A Deku Scrub is a fictional race in The Legend of Zelda.

In the terminology of fighting games a "scrub" is a player who loses because he refuses to use certain powerful characters or techniques because he feels that they make the game less fun overall or limit his choices necessarily as to which characters he can pick (the scrub would call the powerful techniques "cheap" and attempt to gather popular support for an honor system which avoids using said techniques or characters.) The term was later broadened to be a pejorative term for someone who is not good with a fighting game, although many top fighting game players constantly attempt to reign in the misuse of this word in this way.

This "scrub" vs. "expert player" dichotomy is very peculiar to fighting games. Many fighting games have design flaws so that not only are a handful of characters far more powerful than the others, but specific and repetitive techniques that those characters might possess often are the things needed to win (things like fireball traps, Electric Cancels, etc.) The result is at the highest levels of play, since the few characters and the fewer techniques are the only ones viable, the overall strategic complexity, and critics would say "fun" of the game, is markedly reduced, sometimes to the level of a game like pong. This phenomenon would possibly be found in many other kinds of games, including most mainstream sports, but in those other genres the "honor system" takes hold - players withhold from doing certain ultra powerful techniques because they decrease the overall enjoyment of the game. One notable example of this not occurring in mainstream sports is the ice hockey example of the Neutral zone trap.