Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games

(Paperback)

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An immersive journey on how the author's lifelong attachment to video games filled a deep-seated longing to belong.

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, caretaker, 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 his own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how they 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, racialised, 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.

Reviews

"A mind-blowing odyssey through the 'person-shaping' world of gaming. Of Floating Isles is a reckoning with the wicked and violent ways society under late capitalism plays us, winnowing us into narrower and narrower spaces of existence, and it's an exploration of how--through one of its most villainized 'pastimes'--we might imagine wider ways of living and reclaim our most tender creative selves. Kawika Guillermo is a wildly original writer, and this is a piercing, profound book."
--Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing

"Of Floating Isles is an invigorating work of gaming memoir and history that reveals how our virtual experiences are inextricably linked with our off-screen lives. Through his own story, Guillermo convincingly demonstrates that the time spent in games is as real as anything else--that games construct monuments within our memory, engraved with hidden facets of ourselves. Of Floating Isles is a testament not just to the power of video games as art, but to the kaleidoscopic meanings that can result from recognizing games as an active element within our lives."
--Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani, game designers of Sephonie and Anodyne 2: Return to Dust

"Of Floating Isles is a uniquely incisive, courageous, and moving book about a chronically misunderstood form of culture and experience. Kawika Guillermo guides us expertly through the contradictory environments of video games--of their entanglements in war, colonial domination, and ascendant neofascism, as well as their often-unrecognized potential for forging alternative models of 'coping and care and world making.' Emphatically, Of Floating Isles is no conventional study of games, gaming, and game talk. It is a work of passionate research and deepest introspection by a brilliant lifelong practitioner. It is a storyteller's summons to 'stray from the path' and an inspiration for us all to develop a livable 'game sense' of the world as a whole."
--David Chariandy, author of Brother and I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

"Kawika Guillermo's experiences with games and gamers may be shocking to some, but they reflect the everyday lives of people I've known who sought games in their most challenging times, and who now have this book to call their own."
--Minh Le (aka Gooseman), designer and co-creator of Counter-Strike

Author Bio

Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author whose books include Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press), Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (NYU Press). They co-edited the anthology Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press) and designed the game Stamped: an anti-travel game (Analgesic Productions). They have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. They currently teach game studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.