[Buttons840]

I'm not sure I agree. I have many fond memories of friends I have played video games with, even though I have never met them in person. I don't even know what they look like, but there are some I still empathize with even 10 years later, and wonder how they're doing with the few personal problems they had which I was aware of.

That said, I can imagine negative relationships developing in many (or most) work cultures, since it's very easy for every interaction to be adversarial.

Since I enjoy video games, I've before wished to play team building video games with co-workers. Perhaps doing so would be worth while?

[ahh]

Don't get me wrong, I have internet friends. It's just hard to treat them as first-class people compared to those I know in person. It was way easier as a teenager--I didn't have in-real-life friends! Sigh. If you were going to maintain primary internet relationships, close-knit as can be, I can imagine worse ways to do that regular team gaming.

I don't think that all in-person relationships are better. There are people I see in person ~regularly I loathe. (Obviously, most such people I try not to see anymore, but you can't always control your friends' friends, or your coworkers, or who goes to your gym, or...) But they're all more real.

[StavrosK]

I have the opposite experience; Most of my close friends are online friends whom I met twenty years ago playing online games. It was decades until I saw them for the first time IRL, yet I consider them my closest friends. The only difference between my online best friends and my IRL best friends is that I mostly chat all day with the former, but chat in one long session with the latter (when we go out for drinks).

[MattGaiser]

The more significant question is how these online friends compare in your priority to in person life friends.

I’ve had some great online friendships as well but they always fade when in person life friends start using more of my time.

The key question for work is less whether you boss will value you and more whether if you can effectively compete with Joe Office who goes in every day for space in his mind.