Two parents discovered that their son had a secret life online after his death in 2014.
Mats Steen was just 25 years old when he passed away. He’d long had a health condition called Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which the Cleveland Clinic describes as ‘a condition that causes skeletal and heart muscle weakness that quickly gets worse with time’.
Eventually, Mats ended up wheelchair-bound as a result of his condition, and his parents feared that the Norwegian young man would ‘never experienced friendships, love, or to make a difference in other people’s lives’ – but it turns out they were very wrong.
Mats Steen had a condition called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (Netflix)
Mats was an avid gamer and spent thousands of hours on World of Warcraft, where he created a character named Ibelin Redmoore and crafted life-long friendships on the game; something his parents didn’t learn about until his death in 2014.
After Mats died, they were inundated with condolences from his online friends as they came to learn of the community he’d been a part of.
Now a documentary has been made about Mats titled The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. The Netflix film ‘takes a posthumous deep dive into Mats’ digital life, interviewing his best friends and competitors and plumbing the Mats’ own archives’, as per Tudum.
In light of their discovery of Mats’ secret online world, his father Robert Steen admitted that his negative opinions of his son spending too much on the internet might have been misplaced.
“The sad thing is that we were very strong on condemning the time they were spending in that world, and that condemnation was based on a five-minute analysis,” he told The Independent.
Speaking about how they treated their daughter Mia the same way, Robert continued: “We did all the right things, and we were so present in our children’s lives. With one exception – and that is the digital part of their lives.”
Mats was a huge part of an online community on World of Warcraft (World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment/Netflix)
The family now hope that the documentary will help people understand how online gaming can be a great place for disabled people to seek out new opportunities.
“In Scandinavia, at least, we feel that we are becoming more and more fragmented,” Robert shared.
“Everybody’s looking after themselves and their own causes; we have become extremely individualistic, centred on our own things. These collective solutions that we had some generations ago are gone, in a way. So if this could be one of the messages from this story – the kindness we can bring to a community, to the world – that would be great.”
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin debuts on Netflix on Friday (October 25).
