For Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who lived with a degenerative disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy, playing the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft gave him a powerful way to connect with a community of like-minded people. During his relatively brief time on earth, he spent tens of thousands of hours immersing himself in a world where his physical limitations had almost no effect on his gameplay.
When Steen died in 2014 at the age of 25, his family assumed his disease had kept him isolated — but in fact he’d been an integral and beloved part of a digital community, which reached out to his family to share in their mourning. Unbeknownst to his relatives, Steen had formed deep friendships across vast distances because of his passion and pastime.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary by filmmaker Benjamin Ree, takes a deep dive into Steen’s digital life, interviewing his friends and plumbing the Steen family’s archives. The film takes viewers on a journey through the breadth of Mats Steen’s adventurous life online — introducing us to Ibelin, his charismatic World of Warcraft persona — and underscores how community and soulful relationships can transcend the boundaries of the physical world.
Ree first learned about the Steens’ story after reading a BBC article featuring quotes from Mats’ parents, Robert and Trude. “Mats’ uncle — the one in the film that’s getting married — he was my teacher at school,” Ree explains. “He was also the one that taught me filmmaking, and he was the one that [posted] on Facebook the feature article about Mats’ life.” Moved by the story, Ree reached out to see if Robert might have home videos that could potentially be used in a documentary about his son.
“I said, ‘We don’t know if this is going to be a film, but do you want me to digitize them for you? I’ll do that myself,’ ” Ree recalls. In the first of the Steens’ videos Ree watched, he saw a baby that looked like pictures he’d seen of himself as an infant — then spotted his own parents standing nearby. Ree was born seven days after Mats in 1989, and their parents had been friendly before the Ree family moved to a different part of Norway and lost touch. “I knew that our parents were in the same group of friends [in the ’80s, but] the chances of Mats and me meeting up and then being in the same footage together are very [low],” he says. “In a way, it felt like it was meant to be.”
As Ree continued to sift through the videos, he found the way Robert shot them lent itself to creating the documentary. “He is a collector, and the way he’s collecting stamps, he was also filming these family videos back in the ’90s. It’s not picking up the camera and saying, ‘Say hi to the camera.’ He was just observing. Standing still and observing,” Ree explains. “I feel that you can almost see the personality of the person filming. You can see [he’s] a very proud father.”
Of course, home videos of Mats’ life could only tell a portion of his story. In order to illustrate his life within World of Warcraft, Ree worked with animators who used models lifted directly from the game to show viewers exactly what Mats would have seen as he played between 2004 and 2014. He also consulted with Mats’ friends, the people behind the avatars he interacted with for so many years, to fine-tune the details.
“When it came to World of Warcraft, I didn’t have any experience at all,” he says. “My goal with this project was to make it inclusive, so that my 94-year-old grandmother would also understand it and feel included in that world.”
In order to do that, Ree needed to connect with people like animator Rasmus Tukia. He credits Tukia and other lifelong gamers who contributed to The Remarkable Life of Ibelin with the accuracy of the immersive World of Warcraft portion of the documentary.
“The way the camera moves, it’s very authentic to the game. We wanted that personal approach that Rasmus has, and that comes a lot from the gaming,” Ree says. “In the same way that Mats’ father filmed, you can see personal choices in where the camera is, the framing.”
“I’ve been playing [World of Warcraft] since I was 12 years old, and I’m 30 now,” Tukia tells Tudum. “Gaming can really be an incredible space that allows anyone to connect with anyone without being judged for how they look or their social status in real life.” Tukia’s passion for gaming eventually led him to make films and emotes (custom emojis common in online gaming) with his Warcraft characters, a teenage hobby that eventually turned into an animation career. “I’ve met a lot of friends through gaming. My current partner I met through games. She’s from the Netherlands, and I’m from Sweden, so we have a long-distance thing going on,” Tukia says. “I obviously love the Warcraft community, and if I can give back to them in some way, there’s just no chance that I would be able to say no.”
Both Ree and Tukia hope that Mats’ story can shift the narrative surrounding what it means to be a gamer. “I think 99% of the media coverage about gaming is negative,” Ree says. “I think we need these kinds of positive stories about online friendships as well.” Tukia adds, “I just don’t think people realize how similar to real life [gaming] can be. Your cognitive skills can improve, you learn to solve problems, you learn to work as a team if you play a multiplayer game. But, most importantly, you can form friendships if you want to.”
Mats did just that, transcending his physical limitations and becoming a central figure in a sprawling online community. “One of our goals was to show [what it’s like] growing up inside the game, and what I found out was that it’s kind of similar to growing up in real life,” Ree says. “Mats makes mistakes. He loses two of his best friends for a while and then asks forgiveness. It’s a coming-of-age story, so I hope that story also can resonate with people, although it’s [set in] a gaming world.”
Watch The Remarkable Life of Ibelin on Netflix now.
