Think of how gaming has often been reified in the cultural consciousness — as a waste of valuable time, as a source of questionable values, as a solitary activity that only begets further isolation. Much of the public sees video games as nothing more than digital junk food in contrast to the meat and potatoes of real life. But for most who game, the experience is more than entertainment — it’s an important feature of their lives. Who is to say what brings meaning and magic to a person’s day? 

Gamers, then, don’t necessarily need The Remarkable Life of Ibelin — a new documentary directed by Benjamin Ree (The Painter and the Thief) about the rich online life of one particular World of Warcraft fanatic — to validate their truth, but the emotional portrait of how powerful these interfaces can actually be will certainly resonate. The documentary tells the story of Mats Steen, who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disorder that causes muscle loss over the course of a young person’s life, worsening progressively until it eventually makes walking and even standing nearly impossible, with a median life expectancy of around 22 years.

Mats Steen at home

Mats Steen finds a virtual community through gaming

A wheelchair user throughout his adolescence, with the exterior world increasingly difficult to traverse, Steen delves further and further into the virtual universe of World of Warcraft, spending hours on the multiplayer role-playing game, an online fantasyland in which players can explore, socialize, engage in combat, and complete quests. In it, Steen is able to run, jump, and enjoy the landscape in new ways as his character, Ibelin Redmoore. Because the game allows users to interact with each other within the interface, he begins forming attachments to other players all over the world. He never speaks to his family about his life online, and they have no idea what is possible inside Warcraft; indeed, they worry that he is spending too much time on his computer and believe he is missing out on life in the wider world.

When Steen dies at age 25 in 2014, he leaves behind a password that allows his parents to log in and access a personal blog he kept. There, his parents publish an announcement of Steen’s death. And then something they do not expect to happen happens: They receive an outpouring of sorrowful and sympathetic replies from people Steen had developed friendships with in World of Warcraft. As more and more messages rush in, they begin to comprehend that things were not exactly as they seemed — and that they only knew a certain side of Steen, without understanding just how deep his online life really was.

Ibelin Redmoore 

The documentary unlocks — and reimagines — Steen’s experiences as Ibelin. In Warcraft, he was part of a community, Starlight, referred to in the parlance of the game as a guild. That guild kept exhaustive logs of every character’s interactions, including conversations spanning around 40,000 pages. And this became the real source material for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. For the documentary, a team of animators re-created scenes from Steen’s real experiences in Warcraft, offering viewers a fully realized virtual life played out onscreen. Steen had complex and consequential relationships with a whole network of users, and the animated scenes show that he was, to various people, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to laugh and frolic with, and a romantic partner — things that were limited in the physical world by his muscular dystrophy. “In there, my chains are broken,” he reflects at one point. “And I can be whoever I want to be.”

Towards the end of the film, reality and Warcraft begin to blend together: Meeting his son’s online friends, Steen’s father starts to understand the power of the relationships he’d built as Ibelin. In one transcendent moment, at Steen’s funeral, his father gives a eulogy that acknowledges just how integral gaming was to his son’s far too short existence. “The biggest pain your mother and I suffered through life was that you, because of the illness we brought you into this world with, should not experience falling in love. You should not experience friendship. You should not experience social relationships and joint activities with others. You should not experience contributing to society and playing a meaningful role in other people’s lives,” his father says. “You proved us wrong. You proved us so wrong.”

Ibelin Redmoore's friends gather at his gravestone

Of course, the film is in and of itself evidence of Steen’s lasting impression on the world — this is someone with such a fascinating and compelling story that it’s the subject of an Oscar-shortlisted documentary. But an exploration of Steen’s life doesn’t just feel like it’s an exploration of one person’s truth. So many people live out various aspects of life in the ever-expanding virtual world. And while we might not all do so with the depth and determination of Steen, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a tribute to the way humans experience reality now, in the twenty-first century, itself an increasingly entangled adventure that flows in and out of the digital sphere. If you haven’t yet been able to understand the ways in which gaming has changed, expanded, and, in some ways, enriched our lives, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin will be the film to open your eyes.