I don't want this to turn into tl;dr or TMI territory, so I'll try to keep it brief. I'm riddled with social anxieties I do my best to hide. I hide them in various ways and deal with them in various ways. Anyway, gaming helped me a lot to break out socially. I started out with co-op, then moved on to MMO's. I'm very different now at 30 than I was at 20, and a great deal of that has to do with games forcing me out of my comfort zone.