Hey Tanya and David!

I’ve been bingeing the Fresh Out Of Token archives recently and I just wanted to say thank you for featuring Eve Eschenbacher and Mel Fleming on the podcast. I was delighted to hear from people with multilingual experiences, and I found that they both helped bring some much-needed attention the role language plays in experiencing videogames, especially Mel.

I personally grew up multilingual in a community in Canada where language is very politically charged, and the identity and political implications of language have followed me my entire life, even beyond my hometown. For just one fairly simple example, I recently started a new games job, and almost my entire first day was wasted because the office management software experienced errors and glitches when the IT folks tried to enter my non-English name. After hours of trying to fix and reconfigure things, we had to settle for (mis)spelling my name according to English conventions – and this is a problem I’ve had again and again with computer software designed by English speakers with no mind paid to non-English languages.I know language has major implications for Spanish speakers in the US, and my Taiwanese partner has talked to me about the role language players in her identity and experience as a woman of colour as well. It’s a wide-ranging and sometimes complex issue that affects many people, but (somewhat understandably I guess) gets covered so rarely in English-language games media. So thank you again for bringing on guests who can address this topic!