The Pizza Emoji Is MissesMae's Way to Deal With Harassment as a Streamer (EXCLUSIVE)
By Sara BelcherApr. 30 2021, Published 7:fifty five p.m. ET
In 2020, other folks flocked to gaming in astounding numbers. With more unfastened time on their palms, many found themselves dusting off old video games or purchasing new ones, leading to common consoles like the Nintendo Switch selling out often.
According to a survey done through Facebook Gaming, girls especially benefitted from the video game increase, as extra ladies started taking part in and streaming games. In 2020, girls made up forty seven p.c of all avid gamers, and Sixty five p.c of girls globally used video video games as a type of leisure.
More ladies joined Facebook gaming teams in the past year, as well, with the platform seeing a 195 % building up in female contributors.
But what does this mean for the gaming neighborhood? It's no secret that being a woman in a predominantly male box gifts a unique set of challenges (and oftentimes, harassment) that their male counterparts would possibly not face — particularly for girls streamers.
Jonna Mae, who is highest identified via her username MissesMae, streams on Facebook Gaming ceaselessly. She spoke with Distractify about connecting with the ladies in her fanbase and dealing with the harassment online.
Jonna was once a nurse earlier than she started streaming full-time.
Jonna mentioned she began streaming whilst she was once working as a nurse at a nursing home ahead of taking her platform full-time in 2014.
"I used to play video games during nursing school and while I worked as a nurse to decompress and get rid of some of the stress I had, and because of that, I fell in love with gaming again," she stated.
Now she says she streams for roughly Forty hours a week for her Facebook Gaming target market of greater than 600,000, devoting six days a week to her platform.
Currently, greater than half of Jonna's target market is males, however she mentioned that she loves connecting with the moms who to find her platform probably the most.
"My favorite is when I see moms in the chat, and they're like 'Oh my son plays Fortnite,' and then they connect to me a little bit easier," she mentioned. "I think because I'm more relatable to them, I'm seeing a lot more women in my chat ... And then they have a closer connection with their kids."
Jonna streamed on other platforms ahead of transferring to Facebook Gaming however discovered she appreciated how the platform integrated teams, making it easier to boost when she was are living and connect along with her audience when she wasn't.
"When Facebook Gaming first started, a lot of the people who watched me didn't even know what streaming was. Like didn't even know Twitch, they might watch YouTube, but they didn't know there was live YouTube content out there," she mentioned. "And it excited them again, kind of reignited the gaming fire under them, and it felt really good to be able to spark that."
The pizza emoji is Jonna's secret to dealing with harassment on-line.
As a female streamer, Jonna admitted she's had her fair share of harassment online. She's dealt with it in a few techniques, from calling them out at once whilst she's streaming to making jokes out of one of the crucial feedback on her TikTok. But for probably the most part, anyone making an attempt to carry negativity to her streams can be spammed with the pizza emoji.
"What I've told my chat and my community is, whenever you see something in the chat that's disrespectful, a troll, hateful, whatever, spam the pizza emoji," she stated. "Because then we start talking about food, we'll start pushing out that person and you won't even see it in the chat — maybe I won't see it in the chat ... Like to me, it's the idea of you let in and you let things affect you — you get to choose what that is. You don't even give them the space, don't give them the time of day, just flush them out."
She even were given a pizza tattoo to commemorate her community and the whole lot it manner to her.
You can sign up for Jonna's pizza-loving gaming group on Facebook @MissesMae where she performs the whole thing from Warzone to It Takes Two.
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