Earlier this week, Netflix started streaming The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. It's a documentary about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died at the age of 25 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare degenerative disorder. After his death, his parents—who'd feared that their son's disease had kept him from experiencing companionship—discovered that he'd lived a second life in World of Warcraft as the dashing rogue Ibelin, who spent 20,000 hours roleplaying alongside a close-knit guild of friends. Using in-game assets, the film captures moments from Mats Steen's time as Ibelin, reconstructing eight years of friendship, flirting, and connection from blog posts and archived roleplay transcriptions.
I spoke with Benjamin Ree, the documentary's director, to learn what it was about Mats Steen's story that resonated with him. Ree had first learned about Ibelin in 2019, thanks to a Facebook post from Steen's uncle—who, coincidentally, had been Ree's filmmaking teacher. While he thought it was an "extremely powerful, emotional story," Ree said he hadn't initially had any thoughts of making it into a film. That changed, however, when he learned just how much of Steen's—and Ibelin's—life had been recorded.
"I called up Mats' uncle just to tell him how much that story meant to me, and he told me that his brother had filmed Mats' whole life from the day he was born," Ree said. Not only that, but Steen's uncle said that Starlight—Ibelin's guild—had maintained a massive archive of transcribed roleplay interactions. "That was the moment I thought, 'Maybe it's possible to make a documentary here.'"
"One of the first things I saw and realized when I began reading the chat logs and roleplay dialogue was that Mats had experienced a lot of the same things as I had experienced growing up—making friends, experiencing love, behaving badly, losing contact with two of his best friends and getting them back again," Ree said. "The main difference was that Mats had experienced those things inside of a game, and I had experienced that in real life."
I asked Ree what kind of understanding he'd gained about Mats Steen from reading his blog, sifting through thousands of his roleplaying transcripts, and interviewing the guildmates who knew him as Ibelin. "Mats was a very intelligent, charming, shy, honest, funny person. He was a great listener," Ree said. "At the same time, he could be self-destructive—he could lie, he could withhold information, he could lash out towards his friends, he could be angry. Because of all the difficulties he faced, he could want to hide behind the screen."
Showing the full breadth of Steen's personality, Ree said, was one of the film's goals—even in moments where it might be less than flattering. The alternative would mean dehumanizing Steen in the way people with disabilities are so often portrayed: as caricatures with one-dimensional positivity.
"These are all personality traits that are opposites of each other, and that's how life is. And that's also how, according to Mats' friends and family, he would want to be portrayed—not as a saint, but as a human," Ree said. "We all have positive and negative sides. That's what we're trying to explore in this film. We're trying to capture a human being."
"I'm lucky today if I can meet my best friend every second week. And then we have like 37 minutes to spend time together," Ree said. In comparison, World of Warcraft gave Steen and his guildmates orders of magnitude more time to share. "Mats and his friends, they were together a lot—sometimes five hours every day."
