On Nov. 18, 2014, Mats Steen died from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The 25-year-old Norwegian video gamer had been diagnosed with the disease as a toddler, started using a wheelchair at age 10, and spent the latter stages of his life barely able to move his fingers. Though his parents, Robert and Trude, knew their son wouldn’t live much longer, the news was still nearly impossible to fathom. “You can never prepare yourself for losing a child,” Robert says, sitting beside his wife in a recent Zoom interview.
Over the previous decade, Mats had spent about 20,000 hours playing World of Warcraft, an online role-playing fantasy game. He’d also started a blog, sharing musings about his condition and ambitions while confined inside his parents’ Oslo home. As friends who lived nearby provided the family with food, flowers, and condolences, Robert and Trude felt they needed to relay the devastating news to their son’s virtual friends. So they opened his blog and posted a final update: “Our beloved son, brother and best friend left us this night,” it began. Maybe a few people would read it, they thought.
They couldn’t have predicted the response. The next day, their inbox was flooded with emails from people around the world expressing grief and recounting the meaningful interactions they’d had with Mats as his alter-ego Ibelin Redmoore. Robert and Trude were stunned. They knew that Ibelin was their son’s blonde and muscular avatar in an exclusive WoW guild called Starlight, but never considered that Mats had cultivated a deep online community through the character. The emails, some of them paragraphs long, proved their son had lived anything but an isolated and unfulfilled life in his basement bedroom.
“It was sort of unreal,” Trude says.
Initially, she and Robert thought the letters were hoaxes. But as they started reading the outpouring of tributes, “we saw that they were genuine people who knew Mats very well—and maybe much better than we did,” Trude says. Mats had forged strong bonds, provided helpful counsel, and pursued several romantic relationships, all without them knowing. It provided reassurance during a mournful time, and helped them recognize that Mats “was important in other people’s lives,” Robert says.
His story is now the subject of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Benjamin Ree’s innovative and emotional documentary that uncovers Mats’ secretive online social life and the profound impact he had on other gamers. Out Oct. 25 on Netflix, it combines archival home videos with immersive WoW animation to recreate and dramatize Mats’ conversations using real transcripts and game logs from his time spent online. More than just a uniquely told portrait of unlikely friendships, Ibelin explores the stigmatization of gaming and the challenges so many parents have in understanding their children’s daily virtual experiences, especially “since we are living more and more digital lives,” Ree says.
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Uncovering Mats’ story and earning his family’s trust
The Norwegian director first read about Mats in a longform article originally published by the Norwegian Broadcasting Company four years after the gamer’s death. He’d discovered it on Facebook thanks to a post from his filmmaking teacher, who was coincidentally Mats’ uncle. “I cried a lot,” Ree says. “I thought it was one of the best feature articles I had ever read.” He’d never considered turning the story into a movie until his teacher told him that Robert had filmed a lot of Mats’ early life and saved their text messages. “That was the moment I thought, ‘Here’s the possibility of making a documentary,” Ree says. “That was also when I called up Robert.”
By that point, the Steens had been approached by numerous filmmakers looking to document Mats’ life, but none of them pitched a new dimension to the story or could alleviate “the emotional challenge of opening up these wounds,” Robert says. Ree, however, promised something different: he would capture his son’s life through his avatar Ibelin. The pair needed a couple weeks to consider his proposition, but they weren’t convinced until Robert’s brother called and vouched for the director. It later seemed like fate when Ree, in the midst of digitizing Robert’s compact VHS tapes, noticed he’d once sat beside Mats as babies at a neighborhood gathering.
“They wanted to know their son better, because they were still going through the grieving process, but also re-evaluating who their son really was,” Ree says. “My pitch to them was that I wanted everyone to be invited into this world. I had never played World of Warcraft before and I wanted to present it in a way that my 94-year-old grandmother would feel included.”
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Recounting a life through home video and gaming transcripts
The first half of the documentary recounts Mats’ life through Robert’s extensive home videos and Ree’s sit-down interviews. The footage captures Mats’ early struggles to walk as a toddler, the first hint that his body wasn’t functioning properly. Over time, as Mats began using a wheelchair and became less capable of attending social functions, the family, including his sister Mia, made every effort to keep him engaged. “We had to make every day with Mats a nice day,” Trude reflects in the film. Like other parents, they struggled as he constantly reverted to video games. “To become a proper Norwegian, you have to be able to climb trees,” Robert says. “But sitting in front of a computer, gaming, that is just a waste of time. That was the conclusion of a total generation of parents.”
To illustrate Mats’ online life, Ree began sorting through transcripts. Luckily, the Starlight community had saved its game logs over the previous eight years, which amounted to about 42,000 PDF pages filled with each player’s conversations, expressions, and their corresponding dates and times. Though the forum eventually crashed, Ree still had about 4,000 pages he could comb through to build out a narrative. The process was “extremely difficult,” he says, especially as it changed perspectives to include other guild members. But Ree still had a guiding structure. “The film was a coming-of-age story, and when you know that story and you see that story, it’s easier to pick out the pieces you want,” he says.
Indeed, throughout the film, Ree chronicles Mats’ blossoming love interests in the game, specifically with a young woman named Lisette, whose avatar Rumour initiated a flirtatious relationship with Ibelin. He also highlights the low points too, like when Mats struggled to share his vulnerabilities and disclose his physical condition with the community and began lashing out at their probing as a defense mechanism. Using a couple blog posts and the game logs, Ree knew he could find a way to thread Ibelin’s actions through Mats’ own bumpy maturation. “He made a lot of the same mistakes that most people do in their teenage years,” Ree says.
Painstakingly reanimating a digital world
Still, Ree needed to reconstruct these events in the world of the video game. After looking around, he found a one-man animation studio in Stockholm led by Rasmus Tukia, who had a separate full-time job, also lived with his parents, and built Warcraft worlds online in his free time. After agreeing to the project, Tukia and two other YouTube animators collaborated with Ree (traveling between Sweden and his home in Australia) to build out 360-degree-style cinematic interpretations of the game using online models, game diaries, and suggestions from the guild itself to get all the details just right. “Rasmus knew a lot of the gaming aesthetics and I knew a lot about film aesthetics,” Ree says. “So the two worlds would meet in a way.”
Ree was taking a gamble. Over the two-plus years it took to create the movie’s animated section, he never had permission from the WoW parent company Blizzard to use its IP. In an act of faith, he convened a group of the company’s executives in California for a screening, hoping that the endeavor would inspire them to give their blessing. “My hands were shaking and I had to take some extra doses of asthma medicine the day we showed the film because I almost couldn’t breathe,” Ree says. He didn’t have to worry. By the end, “they were all crying,” he recalls. “The main boss turned around and said, ‘This film is fantastic.’”
Starlight members still had one more critique, though. Ahead of Ree locking the edit, they messaged the director and said everything he’d depicted looked accurate, except for one glaring issue. “They were kind of implying it was a big mistake,” Ree says. “I was extremely nervous because a big mistake could mean one more year of work.” Ibelin, they said, liked women with more leather clothes. Could he add more? Ree could only smile. “Of course we will,” he told them.
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Starting a dialogue around young people’s rich online lives
Watching Ibelin roam around the fictional world of Azeroth adds a dynamic layer to the end of the documentary, which features Mats’ real funeral, where a few guild members show up to deliver eulogies. Their tributes to a friend they’d only ever known online hammered home how little Robert and Trude knew about their son. “We have grown in our understanding that it was a huge blind spot,” Robert says. “We have been very present in the lives of our children with one exception—and that exception is the digital lives of our children. We spent probably five minutes there, and we condemned whatever they did on the screen.”
Since Ibelin premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the international audience and director’s awards, Robert estimates he’s seen the documentary 156 times. He and Trude have spoken at Q&A’s after screenings, shared more about Mats’ life, and advocated for parents to engage more with children and understand their video game habits and social communities. “We should have more respect for it and more understanding,” Robert says. “And when we have more respect and understanding, we can also reassume the role as a parent in the digital part of the lives of our children, where we are still almost not present at all in 2024.”
Robert and Trude have remained in touch with Starlight members, even creating their own shared WoW avatar in the hopes of acquiring enough levels to join the guild. It’s one of many positive effects that the documentary has had, though Ree is proudest of the intergenerational dialogue that has already started to happen. At one of the first screenings Netflix hosted, the director remembers a 15-year-old approaching him to explain that the only friends he’d ever made were online. “Thank you for making this film,” he told him. “I can show it to my parents and they can better understand why gaming is so important to me.”
