Meeting Strangers from the Internet

Gaming, community, and developing friendships

I joined an online group for dads who love playing Mario Kart in September of 2019. They had weekly races, kept stats, and after four-week seasons would have a championship race. As a dad, gaming became a means to reenergize myself. Having a little structure to how I went about that was fantastic. Of course, we all remember the year 2020. The covid lockdown had everyone looking for outlets and the online gaming community was primed and ready for a massive influx of new people. Our group has grown and changed over the years, it is for more than just dads, but there are some guiding principles behind our gaming group which have helped it continue to grow and thrive over these past six years.

I say it all the time about our group. The games are the medium which brings us together, but the focus on the community and building relationships is what keeps us coming back. I was extremely hesitant to add friends on my Nintendo account or join a voice chat. I remember the horror stories of the early gaming voice chat lobbies. That was a part of gaming I wanted nothing to do with. However, as I kept racing with the group there were times we needed to connect in smaller groups for private races. I remember the first time I hopped on a voice chat. It was a Saturday morning and one other dad joined. We just chatted about what our families were doing during the lockdown and how things were going as we raced around the track throwing bananas and shells at each other.

That first voice chat with another one of the dads was such a positive experience that my hesitations started to erode away and I discovered true friendships. Yes, I mean what I wrote. I found true friendships with a group of strangers in an online community. The vast majority of our voice chats while playing Mario Kart do not revolve around the game but focus on life and the things we are all experiencing. The bonds built to the point where we send gifts from baby registries to one another, we cry with one another during divorces, we check in with one another after surgeries or when our kids are sick. We do the same things in this online group that most people do with their closest IRL friends.

So it would seem inevitable that several of us would plan a big get-together. The first large gathering of our group happened in 2023. We rented a large house in the countryside south of Chicago and planned a weekend together. Flights were booked, miles were added to cars, and we all converged not really sure what to expect. There were a lot of jokes leading up to that first meeting about who would be the murderer and if everyone had their life insurance paid up. Some coworkers of one of the guys who came from Canada even threw him a funeral on his last workday before the trip.

But we did not meet strangers. We connected with our friends. The single take-away from that first weekend gathering was how genuinely the friendships we developed online transferred to real life. I am an introvert. I hate meet and greets. Yet when we finally saw each other face to face we shook hands, gave some “dad hugs,” and picked up just as if we were high school classmates coming back together. There was no awkwardness. There was no one who was left out of the group. These were friends.

I am writing this on the first morning of our third “Chicago Trip.” It amazes me to watch as the people who join us for the first time fit right in as if they have been coming each year. This does not come about as a result of good event planning. This is the culmination of a specific effort to build relationships over several years. The guy who started our group has a moto that gaming is the most social form of entertainment. The relationships we’ve built are a testament to that.

Now I’m not saying you should drive 4 hours to meet strangers from the internet. What I am saying is In the ways that we relate to other people, especially in our online lives, we should live in such a manner that we are not meeting strangers but developing friendships.