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Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionQueerMemoir
248 pages, Paperback
Published September 2, 2025
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About the author
Kawika Guillermo
9 books15 followersKawika 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.
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