The story of the sixteen-year-old girl from Nigeria who travelled across the world to make a career out of gaming.
Sixteen year old Maria Okwuosa sat anxiously at the airport in Nigeria, awaiting the flight to America that would change her life forever. Her hands trembled with a mixture of excitement and nerves as she was going to be living with her cousins in another country that was totally different to what she knew. Her grandma was visiting her in Nigeria, and when she was leaving Maria said, “I want to go to America. That sounds fun,” however, she had only meant it as a joke. Little did she know…
“A couple of months later my mum was like… yeah, go to America”, she says.
Maria – who is 23 and now living in Georgia, has 152,000 followers on her Tiktok, MelanMari, where she posts gaming content, and her most liked video has 3.5 million views. She also streams The Sims 4 on Twitch and has 19,200 followers. She started gaming because she was living with her aunt and cousins in America, and they had an Xbox. She says: “At first, I had no interest in it because I just didn’t care but being home and being bored by not having any friends, I was like… okay, let me play games to pass the time.”
The first two years were hard for Maria living in America. “Everything was new – it’s a whole new continent, with a whole new set of people, a different language, different food, different cultures…” she says. “My cousin helped me create my GTA character and it took us two hours, she had to be perfect.” At first Maria gamed on her own, but people started sending her friend requests and soon she was meeting people online.
The move to America meant that she had to say goodbye to all her friends in Nigeria… soon, she didn’t know anyone. She struggled with the loneliness, and she was on her own but gaming was an outlet, and she spoke to people online. “They started teaching me about their cultures, about how America is, because I had a lot of questions about it. I didn’t know anything, so they helped me with that transition, and it made things not so bad because even if I don’t have any friends to go to the mall with, I come back home from school and hop online, where my friends are” she says.
Maria first started streaming on a platform called Mixer when she noticed the feature whilst playing Mortal Kombat 11. She was on an Xbox call with a friend, when they explained that you could live stream your game.
“I had no idea what I was doing, I was just playing and two people came into the stream,” she says. “I was like oh my gosh – there’s people in my stream. It was kind of fun, so then I started doing it more often.”
Soon after, Mixer was shut down and she couldn’t stream anymore.
“I kind of left it for a little bit, but later on I found Twitch,” she says. In 2021, she downloaded the live streaming platform. “I really liked it, it was fun. I had people coming in and I said ‘okay, maybe I should do more of this’.” Around October Maria started looking more seriously at Twitch as a career, and she started to upgrade her gaming and filming setup. At first, she was playing Overwatch and some story-based games such as Life is Strange.
Maria’s content is mainly focused on The Sims 4, which is a social simulation game. On January 31st 2022, she noticed the game on her Xbox as it was being advertised for free. She decided to download it, having never played before. She says: “I had already completed the Life is Strange games, so I was looking into my game library and I was like ‘The Sims – what is this? Let me play it’.
“The Sims community was so supportive. They came into my stream and were helping me out, telling me about mods and custom content.”
Mods are fan made content that can be downloaded and added to your game. “The more people that were talking about mods and CC, I wondered how to get them. I got a credit card just to get a PC so I could download those mods in my Sims game.”
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This is when Maria realised she could make a career out of gaming, and it was the start of her success. This led to Maria streaming and making more social media content on the Sims, which started to go viral on Tiktok. When she first started playing The Sims, she decided to post funny and relatable videos on Tiktok, such as ‘Don’t you just hate it when your sim sets the house on fire, and just stands their looking stupid’. When wild gameplay would happen, Maria would clip it and post them on social media.
“My first viral gameplay video, she was talking to her daughter, and her daughter was being sassy towards her. Soon they had got into an argument, and then she kicked her and the girl flew and landed face down on the floor. I was like, what?” she says laughingly. As Maria was still getting used to mods, she didn’t know what was happening, so she posted the video and it was her first one to reach one million views. This was the moment she decided to become more consistent on Tiktok, and posting all the wild modded gameplay.
“When I had my first viral video, I guess I was live streaming around the time it was on people’s ‘For You’ page, because I was gaining lots of followers on my Twitch that day,” she says. “Like… ‘where’s everybody coming from – is everything okay?’ So I go on to the video and it had 500,000 views.”
In order to keep high numbers on social media, you have to stay consistent with posting. Maria has a part time job alongside social media, so she works in the mornings, and streams and edits clips in the afternoons.
Although streaming can be a source of income for many people, it is not necessarily enough to live off. Despite this, there are many other positives to gaming and streaming.
There can be a lot of hate directed towards female streamers – especially women of colour, but Twitch has a system which bans derogatory words. “If they find a person breaking the rules, then they’re going to get banned” she says. This has meant that Maria has had a mostly-positive experience on Twitch.
There are a lot of negative stereotypes surrounding gaming and aggression. But for Maria, it has helped her with her social anxiety and making friends online. She has come a long way since being sat at the airport on her own at sixteen.
“When I first started gaming, I used to hate talking to anybody online, but as I started to meet more people, I got more comfortable talking, especially when a friend invited me to a party with other friends in it,” she says. “Then I’m comfortable leaving my mic on talking to these people, and forming connections.”
This article was written by Millie Dearing, and edited by Eddie Bryant
