[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).