When Mats Steen dies of a degenerative muscular disorder at just 25, his parents believe he did not leave a full life and missed out on a lot of things that a normal young man his age would have done who had not been disabled. They have the password for his blog and decide to post one last message with their email. Within 24 hours they have received hundreds of messages of support from his online friends in his World of Warcraft clan.

This could be a lot of different types of communities online and has been around for as long as the internet has been around, becoming more wide-spread in the 1990s when the networks became more accessible for the general public.
I know that I surely know more people with similar interests overseas from originally putting up my own website 20 years ago to share reviews of movies I did not have many people to talk about locally. I ended up at a convention 14,000km away to meet some friends I made from a podcast at their “home” convention.

Back to the documentary, it seems that Mats playing as Ibelin in the Starlight clan was much a type of person that would help other people but was very private himself. All the chat logs where archived and stored online that they used to reconstruct his interactions in the 20,000 he spent over eight years towards the end of his life playing the game.

They do go into specific examples of his first “crush” in the game and how he helped a mother and son who had autism bond via playing the game and also when his health problems got worse he started lashing out and was ostracised by members of the community. He started posting on his blog about his experience and ended up sharing it with his gaming group. At one point he even managed to record an instructional video about the equipment he used to continue to play the game without his parents finding out (he lived in his own apartment attached to the family home).

While some of this does feel like an ideal marketing opportunity for Blizzard after a bumpy couple of years the main lessons about online communities are applicable in other situations and those that I have experienced myself so I can tell you they are true.
I could hear sniffs from people crying while this was playing and I did get quite emotional in parts of it. Not just because of the unfair way Mats life ended early but also that he made so much out of the time he had under what you would think are very limiting circumstances. An ideal watch and not just for convincing people who think online gaming and social media connections are “useless”.

Film details:
Director: Benjamin Ree
Producer: Ingvil Giske
Cinematographer: Rasmus Tukia, Tore Vollan
Composer: Uno Helmersson
Editor: Robert Stengard
Featured Subjects: Robert Steen, Trude Steen, Mia Steen, Kai Simon, Fredriksen Lisette Roovers, Mikkel Riknagel Nielsen, Xenia-Anni Nielsen
Company Credits
Distributor: Netflix
Length: 104 mins
Country: Norway
Language: Norwegian, English
Genre: Documentary

Trailer