In 2014, the world of Robert, Trude and Mia Steen was shattered into thousands of pieces; their son and brother, Mats, lost his battle against Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy at the young age of 25. Because Mats had been confined to a wheelchair his entire life, he spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft. Like many people worldwide, Robert and Trude thought gaming was a terrible way of spending free time. However, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Via Mats’ blog and in-game conversations, they found out how essential Mats was to the gaming community. They decided to share Mats’ emotional and inspirational story with director Benjamin Ree, resulting in a touching and genre-breaking documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
Geek Vibes Nation chatted with Robert and Trude about the making of this documentary, what an inspiring person Mats really was, and how their vision of gaming changed completely.
Geek Vibes Nation: How does it feel to be here?
Robert Steen: It’s not sad tears; it’s also tears brought around for hope, hope and opportunities. The emotional experience, at least, is a little bit mixed. Tears but you also find hope and opportunities. He was as ill as a human being, but he experienced happiness, he experienced being very valuable to others. So he had all this good stuff in life, even though we didn’t see it when he was alive.
GVN: Benjamin [Ree, director] said that the first footage you showed him was from both of them, but he didn’t realize it.
Trude Steen: Yes, indeed, when Benjamin found the picture and showed it to us, we started to think, when was this? Then we discovered a girl from our neighbour, Josefina, who was one year old. Benjamin and Mats were there together to celebrate her. Yeah, and with the parents, so that was the first time we met Benjamin’s parents and Benjamin. But then they moved, so we lost contact for several years.
RS: It’s also a reminder about the small coincidences that sometimes hit us, such as these serendipity moments. Because, yes, suddenly, we have this picture of Benjamin and Mats. They were less than one year old because Josefina was the oldest one. We also wanted Benjamin to do this because he was my brother’s pupil when he went to primary school. So he met my kid brother when he was 10, which I didn’t know. So it’s not only Norway being a very small country. Geographically, we’re a big country, even though we’re only five and a half million inhabitants. But these small coincidences are what brought us here. Without this trust, and knowledge we had with Benjamin through these links, I don’t think we would have done this movie.
TS: No, that’s true. Because it’s emotional and private.
RS: It’s emotional, it’s private, it’s family, it’s all these kinds of things. And it’s not necessarily something I recommend for people to do. To take 25 years of life, pick out the most emotional parts of those 25 years, condense it to one hour and 47 minutes, and throw it out to the world. It has been challenging at times. But Benjamin has been extremely good at taking care of us during the journey and always explaining to us what is happening, where we have arrived, and what we have experienced. So he has also opened up more of Mats’ life to us than we knew about even four years ago.
TS: This story about Mikkel and then Mark with his mother. We knew about his mother because she was a gamer with Mats, but we didn’t know about Mikkel, her son. It was only a rumour we knew about, as well as Kai Simon, who was the guild leader, and Anne. There were three people we knew about, but we only knew some of the others he helped. I knew that he had a very big heart, was very kind, and liked to help people.
He was even so with us as he was always asking “How are you, mum?”, “Have you had a good time at work today?”, “Oh, you have a headache, shall I help you?” etc. He was like that all the time. So I knew he had that in him, but he reached out to many people. Over 50 people he helped, and that’s quite a tribute.

GVN: And were you able to meet some of the people?
TS: Yeah, we met them at the funeral. Five or six of them came.
RS: We met many of them during the movie’s development. Several of them were together at Sundance when we had the world premiere there in January. Several of them came to the film festival in Copenhagen, in Gothenburg. I know that last autumn, a year ago, Benjamin was here in Salisbury. All the games were there and saw an early version of the movie.
So, again, Benjamin has proven to be a person who really understands the necessity and the need of people who are privately exposed in the way that you are in a documentary to be taken very good care of.
It was also a strange experience to learn that this is the first documentary about a lived avatar life. It is weird from the perspective that we have had online video games for 25 years, but still, people have yet to document what life inside of such a world means to these people. It’s also strange because a generation from now will find it impossible to make a documentary film without including the digital part of the world. So we are in that period of coming from somewhere and going to another place, which can be challenging for many of us.
GVN: When the virtual world opened for you, the first time when all those e-mails came in, how was that for you?
TS: Robert said we must tell somebody out there that Mats will never be logged on again. And we thought he had online friends, so we had to reach them somehow. But we didn’t have any password for the Warcraft or his PC. But Robert had his password for his blog. So we posted a post on blog. And then we reached out to Rumer. She saw it, and she told the rest of Starlight.
RS: But it’s both a bit difficult for us to remember because Mats had died 24 hours earlier. We wrote that last insert of his blog because that was the proper thing to do. We knew he had been gaming for 20,000 hours in the last ten years. That was approximately the same hours I had spent in the office for the previous ten years. Mats spent a tremendous amount of time in this gaming world.
We thought the proper thing was to try to tell the people who had been gaming with him that he wouldn’t log on. So that’s the purpose of the blog insert the day after his passing.
But then, as you say, it took approximately one day before the first mail started to come in. And they were extensive—long stories about how they had experienced their friendships and relationships with Mats through the years. And for us, this was new. We had no idea. And reading those e-mails, I remember sitting on the sofa in the living room while neighbours were coming in and out, coming with food, trying to get us to eat something. Flowers came. It was just a blur in the days after his passing. But when reading these stories, and we cried, and we cried.
TS: There are many new sides to Mats that we didn’t know about.
RS: We had to spend months and years just consuming all this. This was shocking in a way, but also positively shocking. That he had meant something to so many people. That helped a lot in the sorrow. It did.
TS: We thought he was lonely, isolated, and without experience of love and importance for other people.
RS: But he wasn’t. We were mistaken.

GVN: Did that change your perspective on gaming? And maybe, what would you say to parents who see their kids gaming, and they think, oh my god, he’s gaming again, when the virtual world means to much to the children.
RS: It changed our perspective totally, 180 degrees. We were classic traditional parents and didn’t see any value in gaming. We looked upon gaming as a way of wasting time. Time should have been used better. In Norway, we have a lot of forests and trees. So climbing trees is normal. He didn’t climb trees; he just wanted to sit in front of the computer. And, of course, having a severe disability, we didn’t have any alternative. But his sister [Mia] was not allowed to game as much.
TS: Not that much.
RS: Because she had to go out and climb these trees. So we had a traditional point of view and then this changed. The day passed, and this window was opened to us. What advice would we give to other parents? Based on our experience in this story, our strongest advice would be to ask the children.
TS: To seek to understand.
RS: Could they establish or create an avatar for me as a parent so that I could participate in the game and meet some of my friends?
TS: Be a little more curious.
RS: I’d like to get acquainted with these avatars you spend so much time with. Maybe it would also create a little bit more curiosity in me so that I don’t only ask one of the kids how many goals they scored on the football field but also ask the gamer how many dragons you killed last weekend.
TS: Who did you meet today? Who did you talk to? What did you do?
RS: Because this is where we need to be to be close to our children.
GVN: And how was it for Mia? How is the whole experience for her? How is it for her, making this documentary and seeing it?
TS: It was hard because a lot of memories came back. And she has her sorrow in all this. She misses her brother; she’s now the only child. And she has now two children of her own. She talks a lot about her uncle to the children.
RS: There are several aspects. One thing is that she’s very clear about having a brother who isn’t here anymore. She has two children, aged two and five. She wants them to know who her brother and their uncle was. And for that, this movie is a fantastic tool. She wants to be able to show this movie to her children when they are old enough to see it. That’s an excellent gift for her.
But on the other hand, she has also been very vocally clear towards us, saying that you spent a lot of time on this story of Mats. And you should not forget that you also have a daughter and grandchildren who are alive.
TS: So she loves the documentary, but she also feels pain.
The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin is out on Netflix on the 25th of October. Read our interview with director Benjamin Ree here, as well as our review of The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin.