Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games

by Kawika Guillermo

An immersive journey into the author’s lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again

Of Floating Isles is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caregiver, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer's retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.

By exploring their own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how games can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad—they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for queer, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, Of Floating Isles boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our "real" world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Queer

248 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2025

About the author

Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018), and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) written under his legal name Christopher B. Patterson. His stories can be found in The Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Word Riot, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and decomP Magazine, where he serves as the Prose Editor. He works as an Assistant Professor of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews

[this_eel · Rating 5 out of 5]

RTC 4.5

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprised and a little disappointed this doesn’t have more reviews. While I haven’t personally played most of the games specifically mentioned in this book, I still found it very interesting and insightful. I really feel for the author, to have gone through so much and come out the other side is really amazing. Definitely recommend this book, however I think the conclusion and introduction could have been removed. The book was more impactful without. But either way highly recommend.

[aameils · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never been much of a gamer, often feeling overwhelmed by the amount of freedom in them. I don't feel that I have the intuition of most gamers to explore and figure things out. I like instruction and clarity. I have always liked watching others game though, seeing their instincts at play and the story unfold. Gaming has also been a central hobby for important people in my life, so this book intrigued me.

I was not expecting the amount of depth and emotion that Kawika Guillermo put into this novel. They expertly wove in the storylines and characters from various video games and connected that with their own experiences growing up and way of seeing the world. Without knowing some of the games mentioned, I never felt lost. Guillermo gave enough background for each one that I felt included without being overwhelmed.

I think a lot of people who grew up with gaming as an outlet, as a social network, will find themselves in parts of this book. I think parents/partners who can't wrap their heads around their child's/significant other's infatuation with gaming might find understanding. I really enjoyed this opportunity to learn how impactful and inclusive the worlds, or isles, within the gaming world can be for those who partake.

[Gray Park · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to read it all in one sitting, couldn’t put it down