Overwatch 2 Shorthand is twisted, raunchy, and perfect

I play competitive shooters almost exclusively and always wear a headset so the only game sounds you would hear walking past my apartment window would be the piercing screams of my own voice. Without context the things I yell at games like Warzone 2.0 and Halo infinity would still make sense to the average passer-by (“he’s up there” or “sniper, watch out!”). surveillance 2, but is a different animal. The slang that Blizzard’s hero shooters spawned is so colorful, so weird, sometimes so downright terrifying that any ordinary person who has done it misfortune to hear it screaming on my tv screen might be tempted to call health and social services.

This shorthand was cultivated by the over watch player base for years and is deep enough and bizarre enough to exist Messages on the Blizzard forums and Reddit Posts Offering dictionaries to help incoming players analyze terminology. Competitive shooter shorthand serves one purpose: it conveys information as quickly as possible and avoids the polysyllabic proper names given to locations, characters, and abilities.

But while the average FPS is rooted in a semblance of reality that’s often just a few degrees removed from the military-industrial complex and its commonly used phrases, surveillance 2 is a bit more fantastical, with characters like a super-smart space gorilla, a mean hamster on a death wheel, and a sexy sniper whose skin is blue because a terrorist organization slowed her heart to make her a better assassin.

Due to his bizarre characters and their extraordinary abilities, surveillance 2 Shorthand often sounds downright absurd – and players lean into that absurdity, making sure some of the phrases they usually bark amidst the action raise eyebrows. As the main protagonist of Moira, I’ve long believed that her yellow Healing Stream (which can be replenished by leaching enemy players with her Biotic Grip ability) could be commonly referred to as “Pee”. That’s why you’ll hear me yell “Rin in my pee stream” or “I have to suck before I can pee” at almost every match. I’m not the only perverted Moira player who thinks so either.

But there are so many more examples of the bizarre over watch Shorthand that would set off alarm bells for anyone unaware of its inner workings. Since D.Va is a character who fights inside a giant mech and can only be killed by ejecting herself from that mech before it explodes, players commonly refer to the demeaned D.Va as “Baby D.Va”. As a result, phrases like “kill the baby” and “abort the baby” are heard during games – the latter of which a Republican senator would happily hold up as an example of gamer’s brain rot.

The aforementioned super-smart gorilla, whose name is Winston, is almost never referred to as such. He is for all of us over watch Player, simply “monkey,” and when he uses his ultimate (Primal Rage), you’ll hear the team he’s up against yell, “Furious Monkey! Angry Monkey!” to warn each other of his anger.

Often over watch Players use nicknames for characters’ ultimate abilities, like Reinhardt’s “Hammer” instead of Earthshatter, Lucio’s “Beat Drop” instead of Sound Barrier, or, um, “Blowing your load” replacing Torbjorn’s Molten Core ult, which spews lava over a specific area. It’s a suitable replacement.

While each game has its own shorthand, the slang used has something uniquely twisted and perverted about it surveillance 2. In a way, it fits incredibly well in a game characterized by both the diversity of its cast and player base and the toxicity in its competitive modes. Only in over watch the phrase “Could you please throw your balls at Soldier, he’s got an aimbot right now” would make sense, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.