Weekend Question: Have you ever made a friend through a videogame?

[PCG Ted]

Another week, another weekend question as they say on PC Gamer dot com! In case you're unfamiliar: every week I ask the same question of our staff and forum for a regular feature on the site. I'll include the best answers here with the ones from the PCG crew in a post next Saturday.

This week's question is: Have you ever made a friend through a videogame?

I'm not much of a multiplayer guy, especially now. My relationship with online gaming has always been: get into a game my friends are playing → get too into that game my friends are playing → my friends stop playing → now I'm just getting incredibly upset at strangers in solo competitive queue and eventually go back to single player RPGs. I have never once made a new friend by meeting them in a videogame or community around a videogame.

I know people do make friends through the games they play or their attending online communities though, with no real-world connections otherwise tying them together. My brother got so close to his Counter-Strike: Source clan mates that he drove out to meet one at a Ruby Tuesday in rural Michigan back in the aughts. Friendship can bloom, even on the battlefield!

 

[McStabStab]

*deep breath* ...here we go.

In the year leading up to my first son's birth I went HARD into gaming. I knew my free time would soon be limited so I went all in. It started with PUBG and I joined a couple of discord servers that grew into communities of people that I would talk to and game with daily. We even got to the point that we were gifting each other games and helping out with other life projects (gofundme's and such). Some of the group was meeting in person but I always stayed away because I knew that it would all come to an end for me eventually (and you never know if someone could be HH Holmes).

I tried to keep gaming online after my kids were born but couldn't justify the use of time versus actual dad responsibilities, so I pretty much ghosted my group. Turned off notifications from the discord, went invisible on all communities, and that's all she wrote.

A few folks have reached out since then just to see if I'm alive, and I just tell them that life is crazy busy with kids... and it's the truth. I do much more single player gaming now, and if I am playing online I don't want people to see I'm on and expect me to commit to a match. I'm sure others have had the same experience.

 

[DXCHASE]

I guess not a lot of people have made friends playing games lol.

I've made friends but nothin like actual friendship-y. I played with a group of guys in HS semi-professionally in Ghost Recon and GR:Island Thunder but when those games faded, so did us playing together.
Currently i "run" a clan in Destiny 2 with a good majority of active players, but i havent really formed a "friendship" with any of them (even though i have tried on some occasions!) outside of my wife and son who are also in the clan. A lot of my play is either with them or solo outside of the occasional person asking for help, but its not like we are friends and all.

 

[Pifanjr]

I have never made a friend through a videogame, but I have made friends through online games. Sort of, none of them lasted after I stopped playing.

I played in a West Marches style D&D campaign for about 2 years, until it slowly fizzled out when the main GM stopped being as engaged. I didn't keep in contact with any of the other players, though one of them did wish me a happy birthday last week out of nowhere.

I also played Mafia for quite a while on the forum where I met my wife. I actually met up with a couple of people I had gotten to know when I went on a trip to the USA. I stopped playing when life got busier, but I was still in a Discord server with people I used to play with. However, at some point I muted it and now I never check it any more.

 

[ZedClampet]

I've made friends in games before, and we still chat occasionally over Steam. I stopped playing multiplayer games, so that doesn't happen to me anymore, but I may fire one up when my son goes away to college this fall, as I don't have any real world friends who game.

 

[Colif]

Yes, though it was on playstation.

I made a few playing Journey but I could never understand them, as in that game, the language options are limited to noises, and everyone had to use same "words". So I made friends with Japanese people and a bunch of others in that game. One feature of game made that sad... you can never play with people on your friends list... so its a one off...

I have made friends with people via forums associated with games. I was in a playstation clan, I still sometimes talk to one of them. It splintered once PS4 came out.

 

[mainer]

Only indirectly. I only play single player games, or the single player campaign in some games that have multiple modes of play. Maybe it's because I'm an older gamer (69 years old in April this year), as there was no internet, no cells phones, no PCs, no consoles, and no games; outside of board games and whatever your imagination could produce back when I was in grade school through college. There are some, like "Skyrim Shirley", that overcame that barrier. That "barrier" isn't an excuse, but it has definitely been an influence on the types of games I play.

Spoiler: ShirleyCurry

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzkY7wa8Ksxv4M5NyUYgTmA

But I have made friends because I was a gamer and we connected because of that. As an example, I have 2 friends, both younger than me by 20+ years, and both married (and one of them with 4 children), while I'm just a single "old-guy". Yet we connected because we were all avid gamers of single player games, especially RPGs. We were able to form a bond through that experience that is still ongoing with frequent emails and sometimes meeting for lunch. Those relationships also have expanded into talking & caring about real life issues in our lives.

 

[ivanzo31]

No. I am yet to make friends because I am new here.

 

[PCG Ted]

I made a few playing Journey but I could never understand them, as in that game, the language options are limited to noises, and everyone had to use same "words". So I made friends with Japanese people and a bunch of others in that game.

Journey's always one that I wanted to play, but I didn't have a PS3 at hand when it really really hit, this feels like the main-quadrant Journey Experience though, like damn, dunno how their experiment in online wordless cooperation coulda landed better.

Maybe it's because I'm an older gamer (69 years old in April this year)

Happy belated birthday mainer!