Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games

by Kawika Guillermo

Audiobook length: 10 hours 2 minutes

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, Audiobook

11 pages, Audiobook

Published September 9, 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]

RTC 4.5

[Tina]

Interesting to learn more about the impact of video games

Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for my gifted review copy!

[Molly]

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.

[Gennarose]

This one caught me by surprise!I loved every moment of this book. I wouldn’t consider myself a “gamer” but I do love games, I play them with inconsistency and my number one game will always be sims. I think like most 90’s kids - computer gaming and super Nintendo were core parts of my entertainment as a child.

Kawika Guillermo reached such beautiful depths in their writing. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while 😌

[aameils]

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.

[Jess]

While this wasn't always an easy read emotionally, it is a beautiful memoir told through video games. While there was definitely some fun video game history here, that is not what this book is about. Instead, we can see the parallels of how games reflect our life, society, and the memories we hold around us. And grief.

For me, the weakest part of the book was when the author discussed their time being voluntarily homeless and suicidal. Though those topics do hit hard for me, I felt like that section got the furthest away from the games format and was a little longer than other parts that I would have liked more focus on.

It's such a beautiful book that I will be thinking about for a long time. I commend Guillermo's bravery and vulnerability. Thank you. Everyone go read this because I don't know how it has so few reviews. Happy Pride.

[Thomas Hale]

Guillermo's sad and beautiful memoir is also a deep exploration of their lifelong obsession with videogames. The stories, challenges and realities that they experience through games echo the trajectories of their life and the ways in which they have reckoned with their own identity and place in the "real world". One early chapter includes heartfelt musings on online roleplay; another analyses race and otherness as they are depicted in the Far Cry series; elsewhere Guillermo discusses grief and persistence through Celeste. Throughout, their prose is touching and impassioned, and I was often quite moved by this book. Happy I picked it up, and surprised I hadn't heard of it before now.

[Kumar K]

I listened to the audiobook, and did not finish it past chapter 1. This is decent, an autobiography of a man who grew up with videogames, roleplay, and being in the spectrum. Either the subject matter or the writing style didn't capture my attention, so I cannot rate it.

[Beckiezra]

Not worth the limited time to listen since I don’t care about video games. It was sad to see how destructive the internet was to the author but he seemed to think what happened was great for his development.

[Gray Park]

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

[Jessica Murillo]

3.5 stars

[M Heather]

Wow this book is something I have also gone thought!!! Definitely recommend!!!

[Torie]

I love a blended memoir, and Guillermo's choice to blend their experiences with the narrative of video gaming's cultural teenagerhood makes a perfectly complementary pairing. The opening chapter focuses on a specific game I had no familiarity with, and being a generation younger than Guillermo(a whole lifetime in video game years) and was pleasantly surprised that even with being younger, and only tangentially aware of many of his gaming cultural touchstones, the analysis of trends(in games and lives) in a more general sense still feels like it applies outside of Guillermo's very specific timeline. Although they move away from analyzing specific games in later chapter, and I think that choice was for the best to avoid completely pigeonholing the blended aspect of this memoir in a specific time, I would still love to hear more specific game analysis from them.