When Denino was twelve, a neighbor introduced him to RuneScape, an online fantasy role-playing game. After consulting a random-name generator, Denino called his character Ice Poseidon. He started playing at all hours—at 5 A.M., before school, and late into the night. During some summers, he didn’t leave the house for weeks. He enjoyed the game’s social aspect. People from all around the world held parties in virtual houses, and if you had good enough armor and a big enough house you could make a lot of friends. Through the game, he met his first real friend, Gray Shaw, who lived in California. They began talking on Skype every day. When Denino moved to L.A., Shaw became his roommate.

After high school, Denino took a job as a line cook, but his social life was still centered on RuneScape. In the game, Ice Poseidon could do things for attention without suffering real-world consequences. In 2013, Denino came up with a prank called “closing doors,” in which he would repeatedly click on a door so that it couldn’t be opened, trapping another player in a room. Denino uploaded videos of the prank to YouTube, and they racked up views. He decided to start broadcasting live on Twitch. The first night, ten people watched him. The next, twenty. Soon, he was making seven hundred dollars a month in viewer donations. At the end of the summer, he was laid off from the restaurant, and decided to try to make live streaming a career.

People liked his channel because he created a community around his stream. He played songs requested by viewers. He called fans on the phone. He let people tag along on his in-game adventures, and was often followed around by a crowd of dozens of other avatars. He called this posse the Purple Army, and it became known for harassing other streamers and for fighting the Reign of Terror, the most powerful clan in the game. The Purple Army quickly developed a reputation as a toxic hive. But some of the memes it generated are still influential.

As Denino developed an online following, he became more isolated in the real world. With no job and no classes, he hardly spoke to anyone. When he had a bad stream, his disappointment was sharpened by harsh criticism from viewers, the people who seemed to care the most about him. In a clip from that era, he breaks down on stream. He is alone outside in the dark, with his face lit from below. “I don’t even talk to my parents. I live with my parents, but we maybe talk two words a day,” he says. “It’s really hard to not have any sort of, like, human interaction with anybody except for the people who watch your stream over the Internet.”

In July, 2016, Nintendo released Pokémon Go, in which people used their smartphones to capture virtual creatures in real-world locations. Denino used the game as an excuse to get out of the house. He would strap a Webcam to his head, put his laptop in his backpack, and walk to a local mall. This was when he pioneered one of his viewers’ favorite forms of content—ineptly hitting on women on the street. The streams were a sensation; he said that he regularly pulled in twenty thousand viewers. His fame began to bleed into the real world. That Halloween, children who came to his parents’ house to trick-or-treat recognized him. “It just completely blew us away,” Enza said. “They all knew what Ice Poseidon was, and they stopped dead in their tracks.”

Then Denino experienced the first of what would be many major setbacks. In December, 2016, he was banned from Twitch for forty-five days, after revealing a girl’s phone number to his followers, who started calling her. Denino decided to try something new. In a video that he posted during this involuntary break, he announced that he was moving to L.A. “That’s when the videos will start to flow out,” he said. You can watch the rest on YouTube.

When I first met Denino, he was living in a three-story town house in East Hollywood. (I was not surprised to learn that, a few weeks later, he was kicked out.) His bedroom, on the third floor, was a tiny white cube, decorated with a poster, made by a fan, of the various characters on his stream. Denino’s fans joke that he streams “from the streets of Hollywood to the dirtiest bedroom in L.A.” Someone appeared to have emptied a full trash can in the attached bathroom: fast-food wrappers, orange peels, and cans of Monster Energy drink spilled off the white counter and onto the floor. Denino does not own much besides a five-thousand-dollar, dual-screen gaming computer, his live-streaming equipment, and a large brown sectional couch with electric recliners, which he bought during a stream. (“I feel like a fucking adult!” he exclaimed, throwing himself onto the couch, before closing the deal.) His current outfit of choice is a pair of skintight black leggings patterned with bright-green marijuana leaves and a matching shirt. His only concession to conventional fashion is a six-hundred-dollar pair of Louis Vuitton sneakers. Viewers use the term “scuffed” to describe the aggressively careless way in which Ice Poseidon presents himself on stream. Denino’s real life is highly scuffed as well.

Denino is hardly ever alone, even when off camera. He encourages his viewers to stop by his apartment if they happen to be in Los Angeles. He sees his open-door policy as the best demonstration of his commitment to total transparency. They come to offer gifts or praise, to ask for favors, to appear on his stream, or simply to confirm that he exists. One day, a nervous kid of about seventeen showed up, carrying a bucket full of cleaning supplies. He stammered out that he had travelled by public transportation from Redondo Beach, three hours away, to clean Denino’s house. Denino declined, and the kid went home. Young men milled about in the living room at all times of the day. They came from China, Denmark, Sweden, and throughout the United States. Denino’s viewers have spent so much time with him on stream that they see him as a friend, and they often fall into easy conversation.

One night, I stopped by, hoping to catch him alone after a stream. When I arrived, he was in the middle of what is known in the community as a “PC stream,” broadcasting from his desktop computer. Outdoor streams are more interesting for viewers but more taxing for Denino, so he occasionally does a PC stream, to prevent burnout. He sat at his desk, wearing a large plastic headset and swinging a big boom mike to talk to people in the room. At one point, a Domino’s deliveryman walked into the room. It was one of four prank deliveries that Denino received that night. The delivery guy looked at Denino. “Ice?” he said. He was a viewer. Although nobody had paid for the food, he left a cheese pizza and a chicken-parm sub as an offering.

Denino begins many streams with what he calls a Reddit Recap, where he reads the top posts from a message board, or subreddit, dedicated to his stream. The subreddit has more than a hundred thousand subscribers and produces a steady flow of memes, gossip, and criticism. Its prominence in Denino’s live stream can give the whole thing a dizzying ouroboros feel. The main drama in Denino’s life is his turbulent relationship with his viewers. Sometimes they act like worried parents. Once, he had a panic attack on stream that ended with him in the hospital, and afterward viewers urged him to see a doctor. A few days later, he live-streamed the visit. At other times, they are like left-out friends or jealous lovers. When Denino went to Disneyland with a couple of Playboy models and failed to stream the outing, the subreddit filled with posts from disappointed viewers.

“Make way! I’m trying to cover up a crime here.” Facebook

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During the PC stream, viewers could pay between two and twenty dollars to leave featured comments that appeared on the desktop screen in bright boxes and were read out in the automated voice of a little boy. This is how Denino makes much of his income, and he responded to each one. Many of the comments demanded information about a woman named Courtney. She had appeared on a couple of recent streams, and viewers were convinced that Denino had slept with her. “Just admit you banged Courtney,” one comment read. “Say admit it ice in the chat.” The chat room filled with “Admit it Ice!” Denino leaned back in his chair and grinned.