People play games for a lot of reasons. Some gamers might organize their social lives around their hobbies, while others might play games as an escape from the everyday. For some, having fun is enough, while others have more fun when they win. Most games are competitive, so ostensibly people who are playing them are on some level doing so with the intention of winning. However, there are a ton of games that aren't competitive and there are equally many people who play competitive games without any true intention of winning. David Sirlin who is best known as a competitive Street Fighter player and game designer who balanced Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (arguably the best Street Fighter) has written extensively on the subject of people who don't play to win, and refers to those people somewhat pejoratively as "scrubs." Scrubs are people who create artificial rules and self-imposed restrictions that keep them from being able to win, usually saying that certain tactics or plays are "cheap" or "not fun", which is unhealthy for a competitive game like Street Fighter. In most cases, scrubs are bad for a game because they don't promote high level competitive play. In some environments though, being a scrub is actually the best thing a person can do for their game, especially with regards to collaborative games where being competitive can be downright destructive.
Take a game like Magic: The Gathering. There is no doubt that MtG is a competitive game, and in fact its continued endurance as a franchise nearly 20 years after its inception is largely based on the strong competitive environment that Wizards of the Coast has fostered for it. You'd think that WotC would develop their game solely with competitive play in mind considering that competitive players drive the vast majority of their business, but lead designers over at WotC have stated on numerous occasions that they design bad cards with casual or "kitchen table" magic players in mind. It's exactly these players who must find a ways to level themselves (i.e. be scrubs) in order to keep their game alive. Imagine that you have a group of 3 other friends who play MtG and typically you all choose to play tier 2 or 3 decks that wouldn't be competitive for tournament play, and suddenly one of your friends shows up with a tier 1 net-deck that is dominant and just can't be beat by the rest of the group. He is playing to win, and this has severely unbalanced what was before a perfectly functional casual MtG group. The other players have been put in a situation where they have to decide whether or not to invest in better decks to compete in the arms race, be scrubs and choose not to play against that deck, or in the worst case stop playing altogether. Clearly none of these are good outcomes.
Collaborative games are another beast altogether. Role playing games are a good poster child for the genre since there truly are no winners and losers. In an RPG, the Game Master and players work together to craft a story that is enjoyable for everyone. The Game Master invents challenges and situations for the players to overcome, but he is not trying to beat them. In fact, beating the players is no work for the Game Master at all, since they are the final authority when it comes to resolving in-game situations and conflicts it is easy enough for them to obliterate the rest of the player characters, but this is not fun. To preserve the game, the GM must not try to win. Likewise, the players must also not try to win. You might be wondering how you can even play to win in a game like Dungeons & Dragons or Rogue Trader. Some people try, and those people are frequently referred to as power gamers. A power gamer is a person whose intention is to have the most powerful character in an RPG group, frequently (but not always) because they want to break the game (i.e. "win"), and they are generally unhappy if they cannot accomplish this. They use a lot of unsavory methods to achieve their goals, including but not limited to rules lawyering and meta-gaming, which most will agree can really drag a game down. GMs will often make certain types of characters or options unavailable to players specifically to try and ward off power gaming, which only deepens the power gamer's desire to win. To the power gamer, failure to craft their ideal character means that they have lost and the GM has won. In this case the GM is being a scrub to a certain extent, but when playing to win ruins the game he has no choice. It would be nice if everybody could just do what is best for the game, but then again we don't all play games for the same reasons.
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