counter-strike-global-offensive
In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, I was spectating and pressed Ctrl to enlarge my map. A strange object appeared on my screen.
The object in question:
Around the object were white rings the expanded and eventually faded away. As one ring faded away, another smaller one formed around the object.
What is this? what does it represent?
Inspecting a weapon has no effect on gameplay. What happens is, some weapons feature StatTrak capabilities, which add a "kill" counter to all of your weapons. Sometimes, like for knives, the kill counter is etched into the knife, where for guns, it's counted through a display.
Inspecting your weapon will allow you to view the kills you have (if you have a StatTrak version) and look at your brand spanking new gun/shank/thing. See below:
Notice the kill counter in the side of that AUG. It reads "000006".
Note, you can simply click or switch weapons to get out of inspect mode. Going into inspect mode doesn't force you to wait through the whole animation.
It is simply a little bit of backstory to accompany the skin changes, nothing more than that.
If you wish to read more, look in to the text in the mission journals, for a man named Booth, there is quite a bit of talk about him in there.
Best Answer
That is a decoy grenade.
This symbol is only seen, when you're spectating. Obviously when you are playing you see only a symbol of an enemy on the map.