Stacked on a white, portable round table is a pile of at least 100 Anthony Kongphan Kappa cards. If you know Kongphan, the likeness is uncanny: That signature big smile and floppy yet stylish black hair all tied together into a cartoonish ninja persona.<\/p>
Signing the Kappa cards (Twitch\u2019s collectable trading cards based on popular broadcasters) is Kongphan himself. He\u2019s sitting in the makeshift Twitch employee room next to Streamer Alley at TwitchCon in San Diego, California, where he\u2019s just finished his meet-and-greet. It\u2019s Sunday afternoon, and after an hour or so of meeting fans, he\u2019s now spending another hour signing cards for Twitch. For streamers, the work never stops, he says, then laughs.<\/p>
This month, Kongphan will have been streaming on Twitch for five years. A variety broadcaster, he\u2019s amassed more than 200,000 followers on the platform and over 7 million total views. He\u2019s on a trajectory to join the Jerichos and Sodapoppins of the world, each of whom has more than 1 million followers, bringing them to the next level of celebrity status within the gaming world. That might seem like an arbitrary metric, but it’s not. The biggest streamers on Twitch are a different tier of celebrity, helping them to break out into other types of media and make bigger sponsorship deals.<\/p>
For streamers, the work never stops. <\/p><\/blockquote>
What really sets Kongphan apart, however, is his community. The Ninjas\u2014named for his childhood obsession, which started with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and his love of martial arts\u2014adore him with a passion<\/a>. A typical Anthony Kongphan stream will see a continual wall of text in the chat, filled with banter and Kongphan\u2019s ninja emoji. Depending on the stream, Kongphan either replies to chat effortlessly while playing the game or, if he\u2019s playing with friends, will occasionally reply to messages.<\/p>
He even has angel tattoos on his arm. They\u2019re copies of the ones on the Castel Sant\u2019Angelo in Rome, which is, unsurprisingly, immortalized<\/a> in a video game.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
