A documentary mostly shot in World Of Warcraft will make you cry

Of course a father eulogizing his dead son will make you cry. But so too will a coffin, draped in a guild tabard. So too will dozens of World Of Warcraft avatars, dark formalwear rejected in favor of the colorfully mismatched gear of an RPG’s starting area, soberly representing all the people whose lives were impacted by a man they only knew through IMs and forum posts—whose life was mainly spent in a specialized wheelchair, sitting behind a screen. Such is the power of The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin, the Netflix documentary from The Painter And The Thief filmmaker Benjamin Ree. Ibelin is at once an inventive piece of multimedia nonfiction, an elegy for a gamer, and a moving tribute to his relationships, unburdened of the pejorative descriptor “online.”

For certain subcultures, the connections forged by Mats Steen, a Norwegian born with a degenerative muscular disorder, never seem out of the ordinary. Those who spent their formative years claiming friendships with people only known by their username won’t balk at Steen’s social circle. Whether it was DMing over a shared ambition or spending another weekend on an MMO, I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to people whose hands I’ll never shake, and whose names I’ll never know.

The COVID pandemic only made physically isolated lives more common. Masking blurs the definition of “face to face” while the elderly, immunocompromised, or otherwise vulnerable find it safer to avoid most in-person interactions. Working fully remote and checking on loved ones via Instagram or the occasional phone call isn’t that different from spending every weeknight on TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, or Discord. As Steen’s parents encourage his video game hobby, and as his body deteriorates in parallel to technology’s ever-marching progress—sophisticating from Game Boy to PlayStation to N64 to laptop—his life is, in many ways, more relatable than ever.

But Ree initially only works from the vantage of the Steen family’s home movies, where Mats and his motorized chair are in the background, or seen from behind. In glimpses, we see over his shoulder. Beyond his barely moving body, fingers quietly manipulating a custom keyboard set-up, Mats’ character sprints through World Of Warcraft. He’s a world away. But he’s still in the world.

Many documentaries have focused on virtual living over the last few decades, spanning Second Life and The Sims to VRChat and EVE Online. Many of these have also touched on the relatively equalizing effect these games have for people: Though there are still barriers to entry, like affording a stable internet connection and a rig to play on, you can so often be who you feel like you are. You can transcend your body. That might relieve social anxiety, affirm gender, or simply offer a liberating variety of experiences to those like Mats whose bodies are increasingly immobile. The connections you make, as was well-documented in 2022’s We Met In Virtual Reality, aren’t free from baked-in social constructions, but there’s still optimism in the anonymity; there’s a sense of depth beating out surface-level first impressions, a more honest version of Love Is Blind’s bullshit “it’s what inside that counts” premise.

After Mats’ parents announce his death, at age 25, on his blog, Ibelin performs a remarkable perspective shift: formerly composed of archival footage and interviews with Mats’ relatives, the film moves beyond his family’s understanding of his life and attempts to recreate his own. The back of Mats’ head, obscuring a busy screen of toolbars and add-ons, is no longer the focus. We go into his head—into Blizzard’s cartoonish fantasy world. We stop following Mats and begin following his character, Ibelin, who grew alongside his role-playing guild Starlight for eight years. Reconstructed through meticulously recorded chat logs and other conversations between guildmates, Ibelin’s in-universe WoW scenes reveal a rich inner life lived online, one so many of us struggle to express.

It’s also powerful, specific nostalgia for anyone who has played World Of Warcraft during the game’s two-decade lifespan. Like Mats, I played as Alliance. Not only that, but I played as a human with the same stupid ponytail and Van Dyke as Ibelin. In the same way that movies conjure empathy through their ability to mimic a life so different from our own, they can provide exhilarating validation when we see ourselves in their mimicry. I’m able-bodied and American, but there is still uncanny poignance to watching the avatar I spent so long staring at live out versions of my memories. In the same places Mats and his crew connected over the campfires in Elwynn Forest and the cobblestoned streets of Stormwind, I solidified friendships I still have today under the same embarrassing handle that now haunts my Steam account.

Ree’s film effectively flits between the flesh-and-blood lives of its players and ripples they sent out into their larger community, penetrating the permeable barrier between reality and fantasy by interviewing those who knew Mats only as Ibelin. As Ibelin, Mats role-played as a private eye, a problem solver. He was chatty, active—a flirt. He shared a mutual crush with a woman in another country, and wrote a letter to her parents advocating for her when they took her computer away. He advised a mother and her autistic son, encouraging them to connect over WoW. He talked through the problems of a depressed guildmate, who is audibly choked up recalling the conversation. Ibelin runs you through such an intense emotional gauntlet, a framed piece of DeviantArt becomes as intimate and charged as Jack’s sketch of Rose or the painting from Portrait Of A Lady On Fire.

But Ibelin isn’t moving because Mats was a saint. It’s never as sugary and false as that. He was frustrated, and young, and full of the attention-seeking pettiness that fuels frustrated young men. Ibelin is moving because Mats was sometimes a jerk, a heartbreaker, a good listener who never opened up. He pissed people off, and stirred up drama. He was a topic of conversation at a guild meetup that looks like every LAN party of the ’00s, so sweatily, endearingly captured in Merritt K’s photo book. While the film’s main examples offer physical reactions to Mats’ online actions, it’s the intangible effects that tug the heartstrings. The warm trust you’re granted when someone shares their problems, the throwaway comment you cherish on hopeless nights, the memory of an unsolicited kindness. In the face of these feelings, the Steens’ fears for their disabled son—that he wouldn’t find love, that he wouldn’t truly live life—fall away. Ibelin easily accesses the universal in the midst of Azeroth, among role-playing dorks fake-drinking in virtual taverns. And boy, will it make you cry.

As The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin breaks down prejudices around its community and the member it lost, it reveals more than just the life of Mats Steen. So many of us live a version of this. When I move from the Bad Screen to the Good Screen, checking in on the group chats and voice servers that house so many of my friendships, I feel as socially sated as small-talking with my neighbors in front of the corner store. When the little icon pops up in the corner of my computer, telling me that the middle-aged dad living in Egypt who used to coordinate my WoW raids is playing something new, I think of the sweet stories he told me about his children. We haven’t spoken in a decade but we are indelibly linked, every notification a postcard. You and I will likely never meet. I sit at a computer, either a world away or right down the street, typing these words in an attempt to reach you. In some way, in your life, you do the same. And if we find each other? Remarkable.

The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin will be available on Netflix on October 25.