An inspiring but accessible story about life, death and games – The Hollywood Reporter

“Aiblin”

Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

Benjamin Re Ibelin It tells a sad and inspiring story on a level that can be summed up in two sentences.

This does not make it any less sad or any less inspiring, nor does it make its underlying message any less important. But if you already realize that the virtual spaces created by online gaming are actually valid and even valuable ways of forming social relationships, there’s not much additional knowledge.

Are there still people who think that networked games are just games, and that a group of divided players have no connections in real life? naturally. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting a documentary to educate them — let alone one at Sundance, where similar topics are a bog standard, and especially not with the very direct, if sometimes slightly (but not dramatically) visually inventive, approach that Rey takes to the story. Mats Steen.

Two sentences: Mats died at the age of 25 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an inherited degenerative neuromuscular disease. Mats’s grieving parents worried that their son spent his final years in isolation and alone playing video games – under the name “Ebelin” – until they posted the news of his death on his blog and began to hear how much he meant to so many people.

The basic problem with Ibelin (which Netflix picked up outside the festival) is that Rey believes the audience needs to be led to the same revelation as Mats’s parents: that games like… World of Warcraft They’re not just people in individual bubbles slaying dragons, but fully connected city squares where real connections and care can form; That the identities people represent in those spaces can reflect their identities in the real world, but also transcend or correct them.

If you need it proven to you, IbelinThe team of digital animators used 42,000 pages of recorded and transcribed in-game dialogue and descriptions to create the contrast that was Mats/Aibileen’s lives – real footage versus re-enactments.

Mats’ parents, Robert and Trude, documented his journey from an active child to the specialized series of wheelchairs in which he spent his final years. I doubt disability activists will take kindly to the way home movie footage is presented as a tragedy, a series of happy events—parties, field trips, weddings—in which Mats can be present, but not fully a part of .

in World of WarcraftHowever, Matt’s character can fight fierce opponents and be the leader of legions of dedicated friends. Eibileen was apparently a detective, but as depicted in animated scenes in the documentary, he spent a lot of time running around the game, hanging out in virtual bars and engaging in virtual flirtations. Maybe I was fooled into thinking World of Warcraft It’s an epic, elaborate fantasy game with quests, monsters, and magic, but as presented in… Ibelinit’s more of a chat room/dating app/therapy session combo.

The animation is accompanied by narrated readings from Mats’ blog and interviews with a few key people from Ibelin’s life in the game, including a woman he adored and an autistic mother and son whose relationship he helped improve. These people knew nothing about Mats’ physical presence and everything about what he meant to them.

“We assumed they were marginal acquaintances,” Robert says in the documentary.

like Ibelin As it turns out, Robert and Trude were caring, attentive parents who had no idea what it meant that their son was playing a game for 20,000 hours in the last decade of his life. It’s a gap I hope the documentary attempts to reconcile.

The film invests a lot in validating the social relationships that arise in virtual space. For me, this is the easy part. Sure, video games can be nutritious, grounded, and healthy. I’m not even sure Ibelin He confirms this in a smart way. The suggestion that Mats developed great empathy because his condition made him an outsider and an observer may be true, but in terms of analysis it is certainly reductive.

I was more fascinated by the gaps between real life and the game than the overlaps. Rey is less interested in grappling with the thorny, unheroic parts of the Mats — the actual human things — that appeared in the game at times. There’s really no sense in what Mats’ parents thought World of Warcraft Their son’s obsession with it, and what effort they made or did not make in understanding it.

It’s hard to know what Ibelin’s online friends think about the real person behind the avatar and whether or not it’s noticeable how little they really know about him. The mother and son that Aibileen helped are easily the best part of the documentary. It offers a more realistic view of how online interactions affect the real world. I would have gladly traded 10 minutes of Ibelin drinking beer and running around for a few more illustrative examples of his relationships in games.

Last 10 minutes of Ibelin It’s the most powerful, but it’s mostly just footage filmed from Mats’s memorial. It made me cry and emphasized the main emotional points of the documentary. But at the same time, they made me more convinced that it was the story that decided it and not really the documentary.