In a Skirmish, you say hello and take a seat. Maybe you drop one of those emotes you just got in a loot box, if you want to show off. Weapons and offensive abilities are holstered. If you break the rules, the entire opposing team goes weapons free and wipes you off the face of the Earth while your team sits back and spams “Thanks!”
Once the bullets stop flying, your team goes back to waving at the enemy like it’s the god damn Christmas truce of World War One.
There are no official rules in Skirmish, at least none set by Blizzard. The mode only encourages players to “have fun” while the game searches for a viable match in the background. It’s almost entirely self-policed, a tradition passed down through non-verbal communication. Once a Skirmish begins, you’re supposed to book it to the capture point and wave hello to a group of people you’re ostensibly supposed to be fighting. Maybe you can use your abilities to amuse the other players, like jumping off the edge as Junkrat, only to launch yourself back to safety. But you never start a fight.
I remember the first time I played Skirmish. I was excited to mess around with some heroes I rarely played, to finally put some bullets in some fools without having to worry about the payload. I picked D.VA and blasted off, looking for an excuse to get rough. But when I finally came across a Zenyatta, they didn’t attack. Instead, they just said hello. It was just the two of us, and I struck him down in seconds. He didn’t fight back or even try to flee. I didn’t have time to ruminate on the encounter, as I was placed in a game almost immediately afterwards. It wasn’t until I came across this Tumblr post that I realized what I had done.
Everyone comes to understand Skirmish in different ways. For me, it was Tumblr, but there’s a lot of Skirmish talk on the Overwatch Subreddit. Folks want to play Skirmish whenever they want, if only to have an alternative to Overwatch’s current point-capture mode. Although Blizzard recently announced the Arcade, where you can mix things up with unique modes that eschew payloads or control points, for a while Skirmish was the one consistent alternative.
Blizzard is aware of the mode’s popularity, and currently plans to offer the mode on demand, according to Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan. “We like this idea and we've already set the stage for this. Right now you can set a Custom Game to skirmish. Someday, when we get to our additional Custom Game features, you'll be able to attract other players to your game and fill it out,” Kaplan said on the Blizzard forums. “So if Skirmish is your thing, you'll be able to find other players and battle it out.”
The culture surrounding Skirmish is curious — the mode ostensibly exists for players to explore maps and try characters they wouldn’t use in a legitimately competitive setting, but it’s become something of a lounge for players in between games. I’ve only seen an enemy team pick a flight maybe once or twice across the 95-odd hours I’ve been playing Overwatch.
Look at the Overwatch Subreddit if you need more examples — there’s a fun little story about a game of hide & seek played between a Zarya and an Ana, or this popular post throwing shade at players who try to fight in a Skirmish. If you scroll through the comments of the latter post, there’s a bunch of great stories from players — one who goes Reinhardt and plays nice to lure players into a trap before charging them, or a couple players who’ve made my own violent mistake.
If you’re not playing on PC (me and my friends are PlayStation 4 boys) communication with the enemy team is limited to emotes and waving hello. More often than not, everyone gets what you’re doing as soon as you start, diffusing tensions in favor of showing off emotes and sprays with eleven other Overwatch enthusiasts. Sometimes, players just start shooting at the sky in a wild sort of 21-gun salute. Skirmish is a hypothetical — a mode that is defined by the players who inhabit it — and I’ve found an overwhelmingly positive experience inside the mode.
My personal theory is that Overwatch’s upbeat, cartoony tone is behind this ubiquitous player behavior. The game’s soundtrack is very generically heroic, a strong horn section backed by upbeat strings and some electric guitar. It’s the kind of music you would expect from a superhero movie, perfectly evoking the Pixar-esque tone the game seems to aim for. Even the villains inside the Overwatch universe are cool at worst, goofy at best. Not to say the world of Overwatch is toothless — if you dig a little bit into the cursory materials, there are legitimate stakes — but the game itself, removed from outside context, is a fun romp. I don’t know that the comparatively hyper-violent and morose Call of Duty would have the same effect.
The popular perception crafted by the oft-criticized Stanford Prison Experiment tells us that people are fundamentally bad, which has been reinforced by how relentlessly awful this past year has been. But here, we have a micro-culture of politeness and respect that sprang from nothing. In Skirmish, there are no rules aside from what players have made themselves. It’s not just impressive — it’s legitimately heartwarming.
