Mats Steen was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him at age 25. When he died, his parents logged into his blog and posted a note saying that he’d passed away, including Mats’s father’s email at the bottom. Messages poured in from people the Steens had never heard of; they’d thought that Mats was isolated, spending most of his waking hours playing World of Warcraft – over 20,000 hours, by their estimates. It turned out that he’d lived an entire life online, building deep and real connections to people around the world while showing those people aspects of his personality that his own family rarely got to see.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (streaming on Netflix) is a biography of Mats, whose character’s name was Ibelin, but also a window into the digital world, where things become possible for people with disabilities that are shut off to them in the ‘real’ world. Even for able-bodied users, these online communities can become meaningful parts of their lives, going beyond the shared experiences of trying to advance within the game to the point where players open up about themselves and develop real attachments, platonic or romantic, to others they meet in cyberspace. It’s an emotional ride, even though you know from the start that Mats is going to die young, because the film follows his parents through their discovery that their son lived a much richer life than they knew – and that he helped many, many people he’d never physically met.
The story here does not lionize Mats, which would be an understandable impulse for a film whose subject is dead and who was disabled most of his life, but that honesty gives the story much greater resonance (and keeps it from turning saccharine). Mats was kind, mostly, but he had a temper and a bit of a mean streak, and he could be jealous, or heedless of others’ emotions. He did hurt others’ feelings, and we hear about that, and ‘see’ it through recreations the filmmakers commissioned using WoW graphics and the actual characters’ avatars. There’s an eccentric romantic story arc that might seem very weird to people who haven’t spent much time in online communities, but it tells us a ton about who Mats was, for better and worse, and if you consider it outside of the digital context, it maps pretty well to romantic relationships in the real world.
Ibelin really gets at a question I’ve discussed with many people over the last twenty-odd years: Are digital friendships real? I have always maintained that the answer is … they can be. (This, of course, was in conversations with people who think they can’t.) The friendships Mats/Ibelin had were certainly real, real enough that some of those friends he made in the game came to his funeral. The broader view, however, would say that these friendships were real because of their nature, not because of their medium. Mats and his friends discussed their lives and their emotions the way that people do in meatspace, and experienced many of the same feelings we do when talking to people in reality – or, say, on the phone. Their relationships were real because they made them real through their actions, so that when some of the players decided to hold a meetup – Mats didn’t tell them why he couldn’t come – those friendships and the feelings behind them carried over. The connections we make with other people are real, regardless of the medium, as long as we make them real. Ibelin’s life was remarkable not because he was disabled, or died young, but because he did so much with the life he had, validating, listening, caring, and being there for his friends, even though he never met a single one of them. It’s a simple film at its core, but illuminates such a universal theme that it works – and it’s punctuated by a scene from the game that is as life-affirming as anything they could have done in the real world.
