Actually half my real life best friendships were forged through a shared appreciation of gaming. I have 4 really good friends who I see and talk to on a regular basis, and they are all gamers. With two of them, gaming played a strong role in bringing us together as friends.
My best friend and I met in college. We were both into comics, but we were initially a little hostile to one another. Then one day we ran into one another at the local arcade and shared a couple of rounds of Street Fighter 2. We got to talking, started running into one another more often, eventually we found out that we both went to the same comic book store as well, though he went on Wednesdays and I went on Thursdays due to payday being Thursday. But if not for Street Fighter 2 at our local arcade, we might never have talked enough to actually become friends.
Another example, I went to the same Starbucks quite a lot after my divorce. My friends and I would go there pretty frequently. And I kept seeing the same guy behind the counter. He was a slender white dude with a shaved head, and he always made great coffee. So I started asking him to make mine if I saw him. One night while waiting for my coffee to be made I said: "So are you trying to look like KANE from Command & Conquer, or is it just happenstance". Turns out, he too was a big gamer and loved C&C as much as I did. He started coming out to sit with us while he was on break and eventually we absorbed him into our group. One night he'd had a rough shift so I invited him to come back to my house with the rest of us and we were going to play some Dreamcast. He came along and we've been friends ever since. Side note, all those other people who I used to hang out with are no longer in my little circle of friends. We all lost touch.
And my other two close friends are both gamers as well, but other things initially drew us to be friends. Gaming was a happy coincidence.
