About

this Blog:

Token Minorities is a blog devoted to discussing issues of race and racism in video games. Race is a touchy subject that doesn’t get a lot of airtime or word count in the video gaming media, but it’s certainly not for lack of content. As the gaming medium grows, its capacity to handle increasingly mature themes grows as well.

Token Minorities was created out of the growing worry that the greater video gaming community is blissfully ignorant of the racialized content that is becoming more and more prevalent in modern video games, and more importantly, the potential impact that content has on our racial common sense – both the good and the bad.

Token Minorities is aware that having unproductive race-baiting flame wars on the Internet is much, much easier than having a genuinely informative, educational, and civil conversation. Being able to intelligently discuss race requires significant portions of both common sense and specialized education, and unfortunately, both elements are in somewhat short supply these days. So here’s the deal. Act civilly to each other, avoid targeted racial epithets, and don’t flame each other too hard, and we can all get along just fine. Stubborn, persistent ignorance has no place here.

Also: Don’t ask where the name came from. If you have a better one I can use, I’m all ears.

this Author:

I’m Pat Miller, currently a research student in Nagoya, Japan, and a freelance writer currently focusing on The Escapist at the moment. I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember, and I’m not bad at them, if I do say so myself. I’ll play anything, but 2D fighters – Street Fighter anything and Guilty Gear in particular – are my main squeezes. Outside of games, I train a well-rounded diet of Mixed Martial Arts – Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, American Boxing/Muay Thai Kickboxing, and a little Judo/Wrestling – so I’m more than willing to take money matches in Street Fighter or street fighting. (If your name is Daigo Umehara or Fedor Emelianenko, then I’m just kidding.)