Ree crafted the documentary using VHS footage of the Steen family, as well as using an actor to recite parts of Steen’s blog, titled Musings of Life, which was published shortly before his death in 2014. While some of his friends from World of Warcraft are interviewed, Ibelin and other avatars from the game are animated. Steen had also interacted in the game by text, not by voice, and all his communication had been stored while he was gaming. His online community (known as a “guild” within World of Warcraft), called Starlight, helped make around 42,000 pages of discussion and directions available to Ree, so that he could piece together Steen’s inner life as Ibelin. Ree describes it as “like a film script that’s 42,000 pages long, which really tells the story of an actual lived avatar life during those eight years”.
“All of Ibelin’s feelings and actions were in that archive,” he says. “So, if Mats wrote, ‘Ibelin seems sincere yet saddened,’ we knew exactly where and when that happened, and in the film, we try to interpret the complexity of the writing and the emotion into actual animation.”
Just how possible is it for an online avatar to 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 blond, and runs through Azeroth for 30 minutes each day. He introduces himself in the documentary as “Ibelin Redmoore, famed detective and nobleman, who finds friends and fights evil wherever he goes”, and Steen describes the character as “an expansion of myself, of different parts of me”.
A generational divide
Ibelin Redmoore may sound like an idealised superhero, perhaps because he was created by a 17-year-old, but Steen’s parents received messages from other players saying that he “would always lighten the mood” in the game. Another tribute read, “He was there for me, and I could also talk to him about the stupid things.” The film meets Xenia from Denmark and her son Mikkel, who play online as their avatars Reike and Nikmik, and she says that Steen’s mature advice was essential in helping them improve their mother-son relationship.
Another friend, Lisette from the Netherlands, recounts how the teenage Steen wrote a letter to her parents when they took her computer away from her as her grades were suffering, asking them to find a different solution, because she was depressed. “I think she’s a great person and I consider her one of my closest friends,” he had written.
