How Ninja Rules the ‘Fortnite’ Generation

Ninja sits in his gaming chair and streams himself playing Fortnite for several consecutive hours. The time spent amounts to a standard workday, if not longer. “I have streamed 3800 hours of fortnite this year,” Ninja tweeted last weekend. That’s almost 2,000 hours longer than a full-time schedule, actually. That’s overtime.

The long hours, the poor posture, and the refusal to pause for nutrition, sunlight, and chores—it’s why gaming chairs were invented (or marketed) in the first place. Ninja dominates Fortnite with a superstar athlete’s strength and reflexes. He’s quick, deliberate, and lethal; he’s very good, and it can be gratifying to watch Ninja dominate a Fortnite match. Ninja is, in the hyper-millennial parlance of last week’s Game Awards ceremony, the Content Creator of the Year. On Tuesday, Red Bull had Ninja streaming nearly six hours of Fortnite gameplay live from the company’s “gaming studio” in L.A. On New Year’s Eve, Red Bull will stream Ninja playing for 12 hours—into New Year’s Day—live from Times Square. Ninja streams 3,800 hours of his Fortnite gameplay and millions of fans watch him ecstatically. They clamor for more. They like, they subscribe, they donate, and they fawn. Ninja’s gaming chair has become a sort of throne.

Ninja leads a generation of obsessive, professional gamers who dominate YouTube and Twitch. The games-streaming culture isn’t new, but Ninja’s prominence marks a new tier of professionalization. He’s a digital advertiser’s dream—a golden-boy athlete with unique sway among millennial audiences. Ninja reportedly earns more than $500,000 per month on Twitch alone. He also makes money from YouTube, where Ninja’s own channel (with its 20 million subscribers) accounts for only a fraction of the website’s content about Ninja. In web news, too, Ninja dominates chatter and headlines with frequency rivaling a Hollywood lead or a head of state.

In August, Ninja—who is married—said he refuses to play with women in his gaming streams. “Even if there’s a hint of flirting,” Ninja told Polygon, “that is going to be taken and going to be put on every single video and be clickbait forever.” Ninja’s reasoning here is, as many gaming critics noted, hilariously juvenile. In any case, his defense against memeification backfired now that every gaming website refers to Ninja as the Mike Pence of Twitch. Still, Ninja’s trepidation underscores the broad and awkward…