“Behind every single avatar is a human being”: Robert Steen tells The Good Game Club that his son Mats was not “wasting his life” behind a screen - he was creating one.

Robert Steen, father of Mats Steen - whose extraordinary life became the subject of the award-winning Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin – has called for parents and society to rethink the way they judge young people’s lives online, saying that gaming can provide friendship, identity, purpose and human connection that may be invisible to those outside it.

Speaking to Jude Ower on a new episode of The Good Game Club, Steen describes how his son, who had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and died aged 25, appeared to his family to have spent much of his life isolated in a wheelchair in front of a computer, wasting his life. Only after his death did they discover the life he had built as Ibelin, his avatar in World of Warcraft. Friends from across Europe travelled to Oslo for his funeral - people his parents had never met, but who regarded Mats as one of their closest friends. “He was actually creating his life behind that screen,” says Steen.

Steen now believes his experience exposes a wider generational divide in how parents understand gaming and screen time. While acknowledging that there is “good and bad” in online gaming, Steen argues that parents need to look beyond the number of hours young people spend online and understand what they are actually doing there – including the friendships, relationships and communities they may be building. “We should remember that behind every single avatar is a human being who should be seen, recognised and respected.”

The distinction society makes between a “real” life and an online one is untenable, Steen believes. “We should not treat offline arenas and online arenas as two different worlds.  You only have one life, and we should take care of it as good as we can together,” he says. 

For Steen, Mats’ legacy now reaches far beyond gaming. “It is a story about humanity. It is a story about what is the value of a life. It is a story about what is friendship. It’s a story about love. Is it possible to love somebody you have never, ever met? The answer to that is, of course, yes.”  He believes Mats’ story can help bridge the divide between what gamers experience online and what those outside gaming perceive from the other side of the screen. 

Good Game Club is hosted by industry leaders Jude Ower MBE, Chief Strategy Officer at PlanetPlay, and Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of SYBO. It is supported by the Dubai Films & Games Commission, Tencent and Xsolla, working together to shape a more positive future through the power of games.

Robert Steen | The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: Behind Every Avatar Is a Human Being is released on 29 October and can be watched here.  For more information, please visit Linktree or contact comms@goodgame.club.