Watched The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
I watched the documentary about Mats "Ibelin" Steen, a World of Warcraft player from Norway who played the game as a member of an RP guild while living with muscular dystrophy. He passed away a decade ago. Until his death, his family had no idea that he'd been part of an RP community, or that he had "real friends" at all.
After his death, they finally met the people who had been a huge part of his life - and had the opportunity to learn what kind of person he'd really been the entire time they'd been parenting him. It's a story about a bunch of people learning to expand their horizons and gain emotional resilience through socializing online - but also about someone who keeps a huge part of themselves hidden. Mats didn't share anything about himself with his online community, and didn't share anything about his online community with his parents. He didn't even tell his parents when he participated in a film project about accessible controllers for computers - or when the footage of him playing World of Warcraft ended up in training videos used across Norway.
The doc offers several explanations - some written by Mats - about why he chose to keep these parts of his life separated. He feared rejection, but he also loved escapism... and MMOs offer escapism, and equality, and control. These are hard to get in the real world when you have a disability like his.
The gamer type of "person who is online for 10 hours a day and shares very little specific about themselves" is actually pretty common in MMOs. If you've been in a lot of guilds, you've probably met people like this. The doc's narrative climax centers on Mats' decision, close to the end of his life, to finally tell his guildmates about his disability. I never knew a player who finally cracked and told us a big secret like that, but I do remember several people who, in hindsight, were on all the time, and who were very private.
There's a lot of reasons to be private online, though. I was one of the private ones, a lot of the time - thanks to a mixture of fear, and guilt, and the desire for control, and a love of escapism. There was a lot I recognized in Mats' fear to tell anyone the truth. As a child, I was told over and over by my parents to never tell anyone online anything about myself - specifically, I was forbidden to tell anyone my a, s, or l. I dimly remember being forced to play a short "internet safety training game" in the edutainment multimedia aesthetic which also taught me to reveal nothing about myself to strangers on the internet. (I've tried to find traces of it online, but haven't been able to pinpoint which one it was.)
I was a very anxious rule-follower as a kid, very terrified of angering my parents - who were extremely permissive about some things and extremely authoritarian about others. I spent much of my time in grade school and middle school under the impression that my parents would be extremely authoritarian about internet usage.
Until I was about 14, I didn't quite realize that despite having a computer programming job, my dad wasn't as adept at the internet as I thought he was. He could build a computer, so I figured he must be all-powerful, and I imagined that he must be able to somehow tell everything I was doing on my computer. I assumed that he would discover any rule infractions somehow, and smite me. I had no idea what this punishment would be like - I always followed the rules, so I was rarely punished - but I figured it would be terrible.
Adding to my belief that I was being monitored online was a very silly lie told to us by our middle school teachers. They'd told us it was possible to install an "invisible" monitoring software that would instantly alert the asshole Computer Lab teacher if we ever broke a rule (technological or social) on school computers. This software certainly did not exist. But I was worried, dimly, that the confusing protective software I knew my dad had installed on our home computer was exactly this kind of thing.
I didn't realize until I was around 13 that this software did not exist as described. And even after realizing that I was free to dick around on the internet, to tell people (and lie about!) my age online, or to tell people my gender, I would still spend a lot of time torn between the desire to Post and the desire to hide myself. Surely it was true that hiding myself was safer, somehow? I could imagine all the people I'd upset on the Neopets forums coming to my house with an axe, or revealing my less-than-stellar behavior to my parents. Surely it was best to continue with my privacy? I was already in so deep, too!
This mindset made me a very odd member of several online communities. In 6th grade, before discovering that I wasn't actually being monitored, I became one of the highest-ranking moderators on a Bionicle forum, spun off from BZPower. I actually have completely forgotten the name of our little refugee forum. It was run by an older teen, maybe 17 or 18, but everyone who used it was 11 or 12. I remember posting in the introduction thread when we made the forum, carefully reminding everyone there that I would not reveal any details about myself. I didn't mention my parents' rule, because it seemed embarrassing, but I still wanted everyone to know that I was following it.
I remember pointing out that while they thought they might know things about me, they actually didn't, because I'd never told them the things they thought I'd told them. Specifically: I'd never told them my gender, but they were all completely sure I was a boy. Because everyone was, right?
This situation went on for almost two years and eventually became completely untenable. I was doing hedgehog dilemma shit hardcore. I became very close to another kid on the forum and had enormous conversations in PMs with him about school and classes and books we liked, but he was completely sure I was a boy, and I felt like my parents would get God to fucking smite me if I told him I was not. So I put up with him saying regular, highly irritating teen-boy-shit about girls to me. I would end a lot of evenings in a rage because my friend was being a (very minor) dick about that stuff, and I felt like I couldn't tell him to stop. Comments that would have been easy to resolve between friends in the real world were, online, like grains of sand in my eye. It was one of these experiences that led to me realizing my parents had absolutely no idea what I was doing online.
But I was in too deep to reveal myself, which made me feel even worse, because now that I knew the rules were bullshit, my continued silence made me feel like I was just lying to him. I remember, several times, reminding him that I had not told him any personally descriptive information about myself. He was too dumb to intuit what this meant, and I was too dumb to tell him what I wanted to tell him. Eventually, I dropped the forum cold after one of these frustrating conversations.
Now that I knew my parents had no idea what I was doing, I started playing a lot of games with online modes without telling my parents that these features existed, or asking for permission to play with strangers. My sister discovered this, and ratted me out - but my parents didn't care. I remember my dad shrugging at my online play in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, and feeling supreme vindication - they'd never known! They'd never cared!
But then I decided to not share anything about myself, anyway.
When you're anonymous, you're treated like an equal. I remember being extremely grateful that nobody was picking on me in the spaces where I was anonymous. I'd seen the things they said to one another when they thought people like me weren't around. I was sure they would pick on me if they knew anything about me. I took this same apprehension into World of Warcraft, which I played very heavily while I was living in Ireland for a semester in college.
In that game, I was in a guild of low-key players who would raid old content together for fun. We had an often-absent teenaged guild leader who would vanish for weeks at a time, due to a troubled home life and a lot of personal problems. When he bothered to show up, I was routinely treated to rants about how much he hated women. (There was at least one mother in the guild, but he didn't spend enough time with her to realize this.)
But then he got arrested, broke his hand punching a wall, couldn't play because he was in a cast, and ended up in juvie for reasons related to the arrest. I had a good reputation in the group, so right before his sentencing, he left the guild to me - with the understanding that I would return it to him when he was out of juvie.
He was only gone about a month or so. When he returned, I'd recently decided to go cold-turkey from WoW for school reasons. So I returned the guild to him, typed "I WAS A GIRL THIS ENTIRE TIME" into chat, and logged off. I thought it was permanent.
I logged back on around eight years later to do some market research tasks for my job - screenshotting certain features in the Pandaria expansion for my boss. Only one member of my old guild was still online. He DMed me, and we chatted a bit. I told him, "Hey, remember how I told our asshole guild leader I was a girl, and logged off permanently?" He gave a mild response to this. It wasn't until I logged off that day that I realized I'd been talking to the old guild leader himself!
The only MMO I talked about myself in was Glitch, the browser game run by the people who eventually made Slack. I told my friends there everything about myself because they were all middle-aged women and had no preconceptions whatsoever about who should be playing this game. It was a lovely community. I remember feeling surprised that I felt so free to tell them where I went to college. A real revelation!
Adding to this desire for anonymity was a particularly distressing month in 2010 where I experienced very intense gendered harassment online - the consequence of blogging about videogames without a Man Name. After this, I had proof that people would harass me online if they knew anything about me.
I saw a lot of this fear reflected in Mats' decision to not tell his guildmates about his disability. If you're online for a break from the real world, and you have ample proof that the real world doesn't treat you the way you want to be treated... why on earth would you reveal yourself? Why even take the risk? If the reward you're after in the first place is escapism, why not embrace that fully? Why not just make yourself the one with the most knowledge and control - and for once in your life, seize the neutrally-respectful treatment you know you deserve?
Something I noticed about the documentary was that nobody was able to speak to whether Mats got what he wanted - to be treated the same after he revealed himself to his guild. He does seem to have gotten a lot of emotional support from them, which is wonderful. But did he get to keep his escapism? I don't really know.
It's hard to know what you really need from an online relationship. A lot of the things you'd use to judge the value of an in-person relationship just don't exist in an online one. What's the online equivalent of "driving across town to help me move"? Hard to know. When I was younger, I was totally fine with my online relationships being very, very different from my in-person ones. Now that I live further away from a lot of the people I've known in real life, some of those relationships are becoming more like online ones.
But the memory of those anonymous online connections is still very sharp. It's pretty good to be treated equally in a world where you're having a hard time finding that safety. It makes for a relationship which is supportive in some ways - but profoundly lacking in other, equally-important ways. I appreciated that the Ibelin doc spent so much time repeating Mats' own words about what he wanted from those anonymous online relationships. It's clear he got something extremely special out of that anonymity. It stopped serving him, eventually - but I know, very intimately, why he wanted it.