Introduction: A Memoir Built on Floating Isles
Kawika Guillermo’s memoir Of Floating Isles opens with a striking image: a digital landscape that mirrors the path of personal growth. The Path, a psychological horror game that subverts the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, frames Guillermo’s narrative as readers guide young girls through a dark, open forest where wandering is the only viable route forward. This choice—no winning, only remembering—sets the tone for a memoir that uses gaming to illuminate self-knowledge within the pressures of colonial power structures.
Video Games as a Locus for Self-Knowledge
Across the memoir, Guillermo connects individual identity to broader systems of power. The linear storytelling invites readers to join Guillermo in revelations that unfold at varying life stages, with video games acting as a locus for self-discovery. The author grew up in Portland, Oregon, among few people of color, and turned to play as a coping mechanism for alienation. Classic platforms like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog become metaphors for growing up different and the comfort of escapism. “Like our favourite games … our stories took place upon floating isles,” Guillermo writes, suggesting that imagined geographies can map emotional and cultural journeys as effectively as any real landscape.
Global Perspectives, Local Roots
The memoir traces Guillermo’s movements—across America and through Asia—and foregrounds how gaming communities in different cultural contexts reframed the medium. In China, where gaming faced restrictions between 2000 and 2015, Guillermo notes that marginalized players found a radical potential in games that often goes unacknowledged in Western discourse. In Nanjing, queer friends revealed a global truth: video games have long been radical, and the majority of players worldwide are non-white, non-American, and non-Western. This perspective challenges the conventional “Western” monopoly on gaming culture and suggests that games have always served as tools for critical thought and cultural exchange.
Games, Grief, and the Politics of Anger
Of Floating Isles also interrogates how mainstream narratives cast gaming as a corrupting influence on youth. Guillermo revisits the notion of “gamer anger”—a moral panic that linked violent acts to players and specific subcultures. The memoir argues that this anger is a real response to social injustice and wartime violence, often pathologized to stigmatize gamers. Guillermo recalls repressing anger—an emotion born from the injustices of war and the oppression of marginalized communities—and reframes it as a legitimate, even necessary, reaction to a repressive society. The writer’s voice suggests that understanding anger through games can prepare readers to recognize similar dynamics in real life.
Death, Loss, and the Language of Belief
A recurring thread in the memoir is death—the loss of loved ones and the strange affinity between grief and the rituals of gaming. Guillermo links personal bereavement to scenes in Final Fantasy VII and Subnautica, using these games as mirrors for religious and literary thought. The author’s reflections on loss are both intimate and expansive: a first girlfriend, an uncle, a late wife named Dr. Y-Dang Treoung become touchpoints for examining how we hold memory and how those memories shape our sense of identity. The idea that “losing somebody always feels like the world has ended” becomes a doorway to broader empathy, offering readers a way to connect their own grief to larger human experiences.
Education, Justice, and the Power of Play
Today, Guillermo teaches at the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC, guiding courses that explore how video games produce knowledge and culture. The memoir’s critical stance extends beyond personal narrative to argue that games are not merely entertainment but a sophisticated site for examining race, sexuality, and social structures. Through classroom work and public discussions, Guillermo invites readers to consider how games function as social artifacts—reflecting, contesting, and reshaping our understandings of identity and power.
Looking Forward: New Works and Public Engagement
Guillermo’s work continues to unfold through upcoming projects. A November discussion at the Vancouver Public Library invites readers to engage directly with Of Floating Isles, while a forthcoming book, Domesticating Brown (to be released under the patrilineal name Christopher Patterson), applies critical race theory to art, technology, and colonialism. The memoir, and Guillermo’s broader scholarship, assert that games can illuminate the human tendency toward resilience, community, and the ongoing struggle for justice.
Conclusion: A Call to Read and Play
Of Floating Isles offers more than a memoir; it presents a framework for reading games as social practice and for seeing personal growth as a navigational act within larger historical currents. Guillermo’s writing invites readers to see their own stories as islands in a vast ocean—places where memory, identity, and imagination intersect, and where play becomes a powerful method for self-knowledge and cultural critique.
