This is the kind of story that sounds so pat that I doubt a human writer would dare write it. It’s a documentary about a man in Norway who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, dooming him to a short, wheelchair-bound life. He died at the age of 25 and his parents mourned him. Yet they also discovered that unbeknownst to them he had been part of a sizable online community, primarily from playing World of Warcraft, and so had touched many lives. And so we have a remarkable film that recreates scenes of his time within the virtual world from chat logs and animated sequences using art assets from the game.

This starts out as a fairly standard biography as the parents and sister of Mats Steen recount the details of his life. They recall him falling often and having difficulty getting up back as a child, leading to him being diagnosed with the genetic disease. As his mobility is increasingly curtailed and he is confined to a wheelchair, he retreats into video gaming which his family allows as he seems to have nothing else to live for. When he dies, his family logs into his account to leave a farewell message to his online friends. They are surprised to receive in return a deluge of messages from the many people who considered him a friend. As many of his online interactions were recorded in the form of chat logs, they are able to trace his network of connections and even retrace the major events of his online persona. In particular his alter ego in World of Warcraft is an Alliance rogue named Ibelin Redmoore and he was a member of a guild called Starlight. As Ibelin, he not only maintained a large circle of friends, but also fell in love, helped heal a rift in the family of another guild member and even got involved in guild drama. In effect, he lived a full life in the online world even while being trapped in a deteriorating physical body.

It’s hard to think of any greater injustice than being born with a condition that is not only certain to kill you early but also almost completely eliminates any sort of a normal lifestyle during the short time that you do have on Earth. Mats at least was born in one of the richest countries in the world and in an era with advanced technology. The extent of the material support that he received in the form of medical devices and assistants to see to his needs is impressive and must have been expensive. All that was necessary to keep him alive for as long as possible. Yet a human being needs more than that to live for and so for Mats he had the virtual worlds of video games he could escape to, where he could choose as good-looking and strong an avatar as he wanted, see amazing sights and perform incredible feats. And of course in the virtual world he could socialize, party, dance, date, argue and all the rest, without having to be ashamed of his condition or that he is physically confined to a single room in real life.

Many of the shots in this documentary are animated sequences made using the art assets of World of Warcraft. In a sense, that means they were made up. The chat logs include emotes and dialogue but that still leaves out many other interactions. I know for a fact that the character models in the real game aren’t that expressive so there must be a lot of creative interpretation going on here. Still this does seem to be a reasonably fair portrayal of Ibelin’s online self and so commissioning animation sequences in this way to let the audience visualize it is a smart move. I like that director Benjamin Ree has also seen fit to include the more unpleasant parts of Ibelin’s interactions including his predilection towards badmouthing others and indulging in guild drama. It shows that his anonymity online not only provided him escape from his physical disability but also let him be a jerk to others, which is really just part of being normal.

The deeper question here is whether him having had a separate life online is in any way an adequate replacement for what he had lost in real life. I think this documentary shows and Mats himself would assert that it is not and his disease has stolen so much from him. Yet it is also undeniable that the Internet and video gaming gave him a far better quality of life than he would otherwise have had. The online connections people make can indeed result in real friends as Starlight here shows with their real world meetups and that is a fact that much of the world needs to wake up to.