The boy who lived a secret life in World of Warcraft

When Mads Steen died in 2014 at the age of 25 from a degenerative muscle disease, his parents, Robert and Trude Steen, were surprised to receive calls at their home in Norway from mourners from all over Europe. I did. The Steens knew their son was an avid gamer, but for nearly a decade they didn’t realize that he was living another virtual life inside the game. world of warcraft. The story of Mats and his incarnation Evelin is currently being told in the documentary “The Amazing Life of Evelin.”

“I have left this world and am spending most of my time in a faraway world called Azeroth,” Mads Steen begins in the film, narrated by the actor, and the words give the audience a familiar feeling to World of Warcraft players. Introducing virtual landscapes. “There my chains are broken and I can be who I want to be,” he continued.

I learned that my son, who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and has spent most of his life in a wheelchair, was experiencing many of the things that young people his age do, including socializing, friendships, and love. My parents were shocked. “He was born over 35 years ago now, but we lived under the same roof with him for 25 years, four months and 15 days,” Robert Steen told the BBC. “Then he died suffering quite severely from a congenital illness. And we left him alone, never experiencing love, never feeling important, never making a difference in other people’s lives.” The day after his death, we inserted a small mailbox into his house. blog He spent so much time in the gaming world that we said he had passed away, as we thought he should. Around that time, I started receiving emails like this: [people’s] Strong relationship with Mats. And that was a turning point in our own lives. His death was also the beginning of the story, because in the 10 years since he passed away, we have learned a lot about his life. ”

Mads Steen’s double life was first investigated by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK in 2019, and subsequently BBC News articleThis work inspired Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Lee to tell the story as a documentary. “I think his story raises some questions that are really relevant today,” he says. “Is it possible to be friends with someone you’ve never met? Is it possible to experience love with someone you’ve never met? And how much is it possible to be friends with someone you’ve never spoken to and only written letters to? ”And at the same time, this says something about the generation gap, the fascination with gaming for people of my generation, and the fact that Mads is in a virtual world. I think so. Also, both Mats came of age in that game. Friends and family told me that towards the end of his life, he wanted to be remembered for what seemed like a very short life. ”

Lee created the documentary using VHS footage of the Steen family and had actors read portions of Steen’s blog, “Musings of Life,” published shortly before his death in 2014. In the interview, Evelin and other avatars from the game are animated. Additionally, Steen interacted in-game via text rather than voice, and all in-game communications were saved. His online community called Starlight (known as “guilds” within World of Warcraft) has provided Lee with approximately 42,000 pages of discussion and instruction to help him piece together Steen’s inner life as Evelyn. It helped make it available. Lee describes the film as “a 42,000-page movie script that tells the story of Avatar’s life over an eight-year period.”

“All of Evelin’s emotions and actions were in that archive,” he says. “So if Mads wrote, ‘Ibelin seems sincere but sad,’ we knew exactly where and when that happened. And in the movie, we have to understand the complexity of writing and emotion.” I tried to translate it into an actual animation.

How likely are online avatars to represent real people?Mads Steen plays Varian Eveline, played by Orlando Bloom, in Ridley Scott’s 2005 historical blockbuster Kingdom of Heaven. I named my alter ego after him. In the game, Evelin is tall, muscular, blonde, and runs around Azeroth for 30 minutes every day. In the documentary, he introduces himself as “Iveline Redmoore, a famous detective and aristocrat who finds friends and fights evil wherever she goes,” and Steen describes the character as “my own, my “It’s an extension of many different parts.”

Iveline Redmoor may sound like the ideal superhero, perhaps because she was created by a 17-year-old boy, but Steen’s parents say that other players told him that he “always lightens the mood” in the game. He said he received a message saying, “I’ll do it for you.” Another eulogy read: “He was there for me and I could talk to him about stupid things too.” The film features Xenia and her son Mikel from Denmark, who play online as Avatars Rake and Nikumik. She says Steen’s mature advice was essential in improving the mother-child relationship.

Another friend from the Netherlands, Lisette, said that when Steen, a teenager, had her parents take away her computer because of poor grades, she was so depressed that she wrote a letter to her parents asking them to find another solution. He talked about. “I think she’s a wonderful person and one of my closest friends,” he wrote.

“He was an incorrigible romantic and always had success with women,” another friend of Evelin’s wrote to the Teens. And the most loved person in Steen’s life was her avatar, Lisette, in her rumored form. The two met in-game when they were teenagers. In the documentary, Evelin encounters a “mysterious black-haired beauty” who steals her hat. They then share a kiss on the cheek. “It was just a virtual kiss, but you could feel it,” Steen says of the meeting.

science expert suggested What this means is that the human brain processes video games as if they were actually happening. Although this is the case in many societies today, discuss harm Steen’s father said he reevaluated the value of his son’s virtual encounters because smartphones and too much time online have had a negative impact on young people. “Mads told us he was playing games with other people, but we felt we couldn’t get to know him because we had never physically met,” Robert Steen said. say. “But I think if we move forward 10 years, we won’t even have these kinds of conversations and there won’t be a distinction between digital and physical. For young people, whether it’s digital or physical, it’s all about Very much the same. The relationships they build online are just as important and natural as the physical ones. Only in my generation does this feel weird.

Some members of the Starlight group attended Steen’s funeral and still hold gatherings in his honor. Lee says this is proof that true friendship exists in the game. “I think gamers spend a lot more time together than I do with friends in real life,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of value in the time they spend together role-playing or playing games or talking about serious things. And I think Mads is great at asking questions like, ‘How are you doing?’ That’s what I found out. Then, I actually asked him for the answer.”

It’s not that the film paints Evelin or Steen as saints. As Steen’s health deteriorated and he became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his physical life, Evelin became more likely to have emotional outbursts and verbal abuse at his fellow players. The Steens also explained that when their son was 21, he created another avatar called Jerome Walker, who does not appear in the film. “Jerome was a cowboy who drank whiskey and danced,” Robert Steen says. “He was flirting with women all the time, etc. So maybe that’s a reflection of who he is now, at 21, rather than the 17-year-old he was when he created Evelin. But Mads is clearly a reflection of Avatar. I was using it to experience what I wanted to experience in my physical life.”

“It’s a good thing I’m in this wheelchair, otherwise my mother would have a heart attack and be out,” Mads Steen wrote.

Indeed, what makes this story so compelling and well-received (it won both the director’s and audience’s awards at Sundance, and is often a harbinger of an Oscar nomination), Evelin reveals Mads Steen’s character is helpful: his strength, his humor, and sometimes his melancholy. “In this other world, girls wouldn’t see me in a wheelchair or anything different. They would conveniently put my heart, soul, and spirit into a handsome, strong body,” Steen said. Talk about life in Azeroth. “High school had parties, attractive girls, and a lot of things a 17-year-old boy could want, but they were all just dreams, out of reach for me. But dreams It’s nice this way. You can always come back.”