For me, YES! I started playing my video game again and once again I am meeting amazing people that I'd like to get to know more and I am spending more time with. I have never met these people face to face. It got me to thinking...can I call them my friends? I still keep in touch with my guildies and I have never forgotten them when I stopped playing \nor stopped talking to them completely. In person or not, I feel we do build real relationships. We do things in game that establish to others what kind of person we are. We share with one another, and defend one another, and confide RL stuff in one another and have countless special moments in game that are so beautiful and memorable.
The fact that these people are listed as friends in-game doesn't mean that there is only one kind of person. Some people you confide in, take advice from and help in times of trouble are friends, no doubt. In game and IRL friends drift apart, but that is no proof that friendship does not exist.
I've lost contact with a lot of people I knew in real life when I stopped having daily contact with them especially when becoming ill. You stop talking to your WoW/Second Life friends when you quit the game like you stop talking to your college friends when you finish high school and college or leave a job for a new one. We will still try to keep in touch, but it doesn't make you NOT friends. Neither of those things affects the definition of the word friend at all.
What do you think?
