Almost a year ago I started fencing again, a sport I'd done for a few years as a kid before getting burned out on too much competition. The transition from gaming back to sport has been interesting and quite surprising, with the skills gaming gives you being surprisingly applicable now that I've seen fencing before I was a gamer and after.

The first surprise going from gaming to fencing was understanding of the rules. In gaming the rules are enforced automatically by the nature of the virtual universe you play the game in. If something is against the rules (in a mature competitive game) then it's simply impossible to do that thing, you cannot make armour spawn faster or run out of bounds by any normal in game action. In a real sport the rules are an artificial set of ideas imposed on reality, which doesn't really give a fuck about your sport so the sport takes place in the mind. What is surprising, given these differences is that in retrospect I find gamers to have far greater awareness of the rules of their game and opinion about those rules than I have found in fencing. In gaming if any little thing is non-standard then people will be pissed, even at a relatively casual skill level- people want things to be standard and they know what the standards are. In fencing the understanding and awareness of rules I've encountered has been really poor, with each person, including coaches and referees, having their own idea of how it's supposed to work that's sometimes entirely different from the written rules. So much so that I've had to print out the international rules and force a coach to read part of them.

The use of demos as a way of improving is very normal in gaming, most players watch demos and replays for entertainment and quite a lot of players to see tricks, tips and strategies. In sport this is a really useful skill but seems to be something only done at the higher levels. So gamers are better at teaching themselves the game, in part maybe because very few gamers get any kind of coaching so start off in the habit of teaching themselves.

Mental focus: most of us have spent entire days playing Quake games or Starcraft or whatever other fairly intense game that requires complete focus. The ability to concentrate that this builds, and the mental control to throw out nervousness or thoughts about unrelated things to sport is extremely useful. It's quite noticeable that non-gamers' attention, especially in a sport that's quite a lot like gaming like fencing, wavers much more easily.

This also extends into tactical and strategic thinking. Most people fancy themselves as some kind of Napoleon re-incarnate, then if you game for a while you discover not only that you suck but that you have a whole set of fake rules built up in your mind about what's allowed (Sirlin's Scrub), what's lame and so on. A bit of online gaming rips this naiveté away if you want to win at all and replaces it with knowing how to do every lame move and learning how to reach the conventional game by applying the answers to the cheap stuff. Transferring that skill to sport you come prepared at a much higher level than would be associated with your overall skill-level (because of course these skills exist in all sports) to abuse and open up even the smallest mistakes your opponent makes. You're also far more ready to change what you're doing and strategize on the fly if something isn't working, non-gamers are surprisingly terrible at this, with very little concept of a metagame and how to use it.

Of course there are things I'm really enjoying in sport that gaming lacks- practice in sport feels like it pays off more, perhaps because practice time is more limited than in gaming where many people put many hours per day in every day. Gym time is almost like buying a good gaming mouse each time you do it (I know that's a lame analogy, still it's the same feeling of being that bit better), giving you that bit more speed and power to use next time you play the sport and changing the sport slightly as a result. In gaming this effect is far more limited as you're heavily bound by the predetermined resource and power levels of the elements that make up the game.

Anyone else found gaming applies surprisingly to real sports?