Game Communities

In the reading, Pearce takes a look at The Gathering of Uru, a group of Uru beta testers that stayed together after the game shut down.
Even only after a short amount of time, TGU became a very close group. As the game shut down, the group "moved into a circular configuration close enough so that their avatars would appear to be holding hands." Clearly you can see that for many people, games are very important, especially in regards to the people they meet. Quickly following the shut down of the game, many different poems were written and posted on Koalanet, a forum where the Uru players designated as a meeting place to stay together. The following is an excerpt from a poem from Koalanet:
"I have a family, I have friend,
my busy schedule it never ends
Out to a meeting, out to lunch,
Can't wait to get home to spend time with this bunch
Then as I played day after day
my opinion, it began to sway
This is no longer a game to me
These people are part of my family"
What was only a game grew to become much more. The relationships created by the game were strong enough to be called a family. The members wanted to stay together and many discussions rose over which game they should move onto next. The final compromise was to have Koalanet be their main form of connection and everyone could move onto games at their own discretion, with There.com and Second Life being the biggest two.
The reading makes it sound as if Uru, There.com, and Second Life were all different countries. Uru was lost somehow and now the "refugees" were trying to find a new "homeland" to immigrate to. When the majority of TGU decided to move to There.com, "Alice, an established Thereian, offered the refugees some space near her community, Emerald City, as a settlement." As a result, there were "festering resentments among the 'indigenous' Thereians and Emerald City residents, a number of whom moved out." The use of words like refugees, homeland, Thereian, settlement, indigenous, makes the situation sound incredibly realistic of a real family with real Uru culture, settling into a different world and experiencing resentment from people already living there. I don't know if Pearce is trying to make a point or is just telling about this experience, but what I've gotten from it is that a community doesn't necessarily have to be in real life to have real meanings to the people in them.
Do you think these virtual relationships could be ruined by meeting the people in real life? Are some relationships strictly virtual and wouldn't work in the real world?