‘He was an incurable romantic’: The boy who lived a secret life in World of Warcraft

Ree created the documentary using VHS footage of the Steen family, as well as having an actor read portions of Steen’s blog, Musings of Life, published shortly before his death in 2014. Some of his friends from World of Warcraft are portrayed by Ibelin, who was interviewed, and other avatars in the game. Steen also interacted in the game via text, not voice, and all of his communications were stored while he was playing the game. Her online community called Starlight (known as a “guild” in World of Warcraft) helped provide nearly 42,000 pages of discussions and instructions to Ree so that Steen could piece together her inner life as Ibelin. Ree describes it as “like a movie script that’s 42,000 pages long, telling the story of a real-lived avatar life over the course of eight years.”

“All of Ibelin’s emotions and actions were in that archive,” he says. “So if Mats wrote, ‘Ibelin looks sincere but sad,’ we knew exactly where and when that happened, and in the film, we try to translate the complexity of the writing and the emotion into actual animation.”

How likely is it that an online avatar could represent a real person? Mats Steen named his alter ego after Orlando Bloom’s character Balian of Ibelin in Ridley Scott’s 2005 historical epic Kingdom of Heaven. In the game, Ibelin is tall, muscular, and blonde, and runs around Azeroth for 30 minutes every day. In the documentary, she introduces herself as “Ibelin Redmoore, the famous detective and nobleman who finds friends and fights evil wherever she goes”, and Steen describes the character as “an extension of myself, different sides of me”.

generation divide

Ibelin Redmoore may seem like an idealized superhero, perhaps because she was created by a 17-year-old, but Steen’s parents received messages from other players saying she would “always lighten the mood” in the game. “He was there for me and I could talk to him about stupid things,” another tribute read. The film meets Xenia and her son Mikkel from Denmark, who play online as avatars Reike and Nikmik, who say Steen’s mature advice is crucial to helping them improve their mother-son relationship.

Another friend, a Dutch named Lisette, says that young Steen wrote a letter to his parents, who took away his computer because his grades were bad, and asked them to find a different solution because he was depressed. “I think he is a wonderful person and consider him one of my closest friends,” she wrote.