The scrub weaves the circle

I was recently at The Smoke, a festival of chamber larp in London. There I played the beautiful non-verbal larp "Westwind", designed by Mo Holkar. Today at lunch I watched, quite arbitrarily, a talk he gave on the way that players cooperate to avoid holes appearing within the logic of the larps they're playing:

(it's a good talk, and short)

And this got me thinking about the idea of playing with two brains - an in-game brain and an out-of-game brain. The in-game brain is trying to win*, the out-of-game brain is thinking about what winning would consist of, what kind of person the in-game character is, the social rules of the play, and how to facilitate good play for other people. Or, sometimes, how other people ought to be facilitating good play for you. I find this is a particularity of role play - the need to exist on these two levels simultaneously, to exist within a role and also to determine what that role should be. It's beautiful, if also tiring.

Compare this against David Sirlin, a designer who typically works within fighting games, and his idea of "the scrub". His book "Playing To Win" revolves around the idea of the scrub, someone who is attached to limited ideas of what play is considered valid and therefore does not play as hard as it would be possible to play. A player who has a goal other than winning. I think ultimately David Sirlin's ideas come from an aesthetic place - he finds these social metarules fuzzy and ugly, he finds the appeals to these social metarules contemptible, and he finds a pure beauty in deep exploration of the actual rules of the game. A depth of exploration which is inhibited by these social rules. I guess a classic example of this would be the Fosbury Flop - finding an entirely new way to jump over a pole, a way that is unconventional and against custom but nevertheless superior. Would high jumping be as interesting if discovering such a thing was not permitted?

And I do feel compelled to make the obvious statement: role playing games and fighting games are different types of game. I mean, it's not even clear to me that a larp and a videogame are both the same category of thing in a fundamental sense - the nature of what a "rule" is is fundamentally different if it is enforced socially versus whether it is enforced programmatically (different again if it is enforced by physics, to return to high jumping for a sec). But also worth thinking how depth can extend in different directions, and how beauty can be found in many places.

* This word "win" is tricky. I don't know that I think it's correct. I considered "achieve their current goals", which is vaguer but I think also wrong in a fundamental way. When you are embodying a character in role play, the character can have many contradictory desires and impulses, many not even known to themselves. What are you trying to do with your life? What rubric guides the actions you take? Why should the answer be any simpler for a fictional character?