Articles
Teens and Screens: Game of Life, Indeed: "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin"
Full citation in the ACM Digital Library 
| PDF 
Ubiquity
Volume 2025, Number September (2025), Pages 1-4
Ubiquity Symposium: Teens and Screens: Game of Life, Indeed: "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin"
Espen Andersen
DOI: 10.1145/3760268
Sometimes, the most social person in the room might be the teen with the screen.
Mats Steen was a young Norwegian man, born in 1989. At age four he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an ALS-like syndrome where muscles gradually atrophy. Patients rarely live beyond 25—and most of that time will be spent in a wheelchair with diminishing ability to move and, eventually, to communicate.
Mats' parents took care of him as he led a more and more lonely life, eventually building an apartment for him in the basement of their house. He spent most of his time online, and his parents worried about him. At 25, he died. Toward the end of his life, he started writing a blog. One of the last things he did was leave his parents the password to his computer.
The day after he died, his parents and sister wrote a blog post announcing his death—and were astonished when emails started rolling in. At his funeral, six strangers turned up, from countries all over Europe. One of them stood up and said:
"While we are gathered here today, a candle is lit for Mats in a classroom in the Netherlands, in a call center in Ireland, in a library in Sweden, in a small barber shop in Finland, at a municipal office in Denmark, many places in England. All over Europe, Mats is remembered, by many more than those who could be here today."
It turned out that online, Mats was not Mats Steen, a young man in a wheelchair with dim prospects. In World of Warcraft, he was Ibelin—more precisely, Lord Ibelin Redmoore—a tall, strapping Viking with a reddish beard and a ponytail. He had long relationships with members of Starlight, a guild of characters which had existed for more than 10 years. He was something of a ladies' man, with at least one long-time romantic relationship. He counseled his fellow characters on personal matters and was a center of attention at the local (online) tavern.
And every morning, he went for a half-hour run.
Ibelin The Movie
"The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" is a 2024 documentary on Netflix, made with video footage from Mats' childhood, animations from World of Warcraft, and interviews with those who knew him—his guild leader, a girl friend in the Netherlands, his parents. The film is immensely moving, providing a counter to the perhaps trite idea that online life is somehow inferior to the real thing—more isolating, less expressive, less emotionally fulfilling.
One of the striking impressions of the movie is not that a wheelchair-bound boy gradually wasting away can find joy and fulfilment in an online world—that is to be expected—but that he can be of tremendous value to others simply because his handicap becomes invisible. The movie makes this point, gradually piecing together the story of Ibelin as much as his parents must have discovered it. The worlds intersect toward the end of Mats' life, when hospital stays forced him to pause his game-playing, leading his fellow guild members to look for him and try to contact him.
The other players come from all walks of life, but (at least the ones interviewed) share certain characteristics: introversion, a degree of social isolation (one woman referring to herself as "the one spending time gaming when others go out and play"), language skills, and a willingness to concentrate and learn a complicated set of rules.
The graphics in the movie are interesting in themselves—I am not a World of Warcraft player, so I have no way of judging whether they are true to the player experience or somehow enhanced. World of Warcraft games are logged, and these logs formed the basis for the animations. The filmmakers forgot to ask permission to use the concepts from the company that owns the game. They ended up having to, rather nervously, show the completed product to the top management group, who promptly gave their permission.
I'd like to think that was not just a business decision.
Teen and Screens and Life
When communications costs drop, we communicate more and look outside our regular categories, because we can. Any social forum needs a critical mass to function, but with decreased cost of communication and search, that critical mass is easier to reach. In research, this means that sparse data from rare diseases can be cobbled together from all over the world, for instance. For social media, it means people with specific interests can link together and communicate. Much has been written about the dysfunctional aspect of this—echo chambers, political and ethical brinkmanship, fraud and exploitation.
Video games can be an addiction, especially for young men. As the comedian Jimmy Carr recently pointed out, playing a video game can be a proxy for a non-existent career. But it is worth remembering that the original intent of the internet was to connect people to improve communication and share ideas and interests. The story of Ibelin serves to remind us that sometimes the more optimistic projections of a new technology do come true.
And perhaps that the most social person in the room may be the teen with the screen.
Author
Espen Andersen is the Associate Professor of Strategy and Director of the Technology Strategy Center with The Norwegian Business School in Oslo, and a frequent speaker and writer on technology and business strategy issues.
2025 Copyright held by the Owner/Author.
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
COMMENTS