Introduction: A Memoir Framed by a Dark Path
Kawika Guillermo’s memoir Of Floating Isles begins not with a conventional life story, but with a video game chronicle—the Path—a psychological horror experience that reimagines Little Red Riding Hood as a perilous journey through an open, encroaching forest. In Guillermo’s hands, the game becomes a lens for self-discovery, a way to map how identity forms under colonial power and cultural marginalization. The book unfolds as a linear personal narrative that gradually reveals broader themes, suggesting that self-knowledge can be pursued through the choices we make in digital and real worlds alike.
Gaming as a Locus for Self-Knowledge
From a young age in Portland, Oregon, Guillermo found solace in video games, a coping mechanism for feeling different in a predominantly white neighborhood. The memoir casts classic platforms like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog as metaphors for adolescence: floating isles where the narrator’s sense of self is cultivated, and where staying on the path is less a rule than a test of staying true to one’s own story amid disorienting surroundings. Guillermo’s phrasing—“Like our favourite games … our stories took place upon floating isles”—frames a life narrative that depends on the imaginative space games create to imagine belonging beyond the ground-level gaze of the majority culture.
Randomness, Rhythm, and Revolution: A Global View of Gaming
The memoir tracks Guillermo’s travels across the United States and Asia after high school, offering a global critique of video games as cultural artifacts. In China, where gaming was once officially restricted, Guillermo notes how marginalized communities found sanctuary in a medium often dismissed as a Western pastime. In Nanjing, queer friends reveal a simple but radical truth: video games have long been a vehicle for resistance and transnational communication. The realization that gaming’s meaning extends far beyond Western consumer culture reframes the medium as a global force—one that teaches readers that identity and race are produced through play, storytelling, and social interaction as much as through birthright or nationality.
Deconstructing Gamer Anger and Moral Panics
Of Floating Isles also interrogates the so-called “gamer anger” that moral panics have historically blamed on young players. Guillermo recalls how boyish anger was pathologized—linked to violence and social deviance—while the real drivers were structural injustices, war, and the violence disproportionately visited upon brown bodies. The memoir argues that anger, when understood rather than silenced, can reveal subtext about power, empathy, and resistance. This critique aligns with Guillermo’s broader scholarly work at the University of British Columbia, where they teach how games function as producers of knowledge and culture within feminist and postcolonial frameworks.
Death, Grief, and the Consoles We Use to Cope
A sequence of reflections on loss anchors the narrative. Guillermo connects grief to game worlds—the experience of death in Final Fantasy VII and Subnautica is treated as a doorway to religious or literary contemplation as well as personal healing. The author’s late wife, Dr. Y-Dang Treoung, is a throughline—an intimate reminder that memory and mourning can be navigated through storytelling and the rituals of play. As Guillermo notes with candid humor about vitality and mortality, the aim is not eternal youth but continued, meaningful exploration of life through the stories we tell and the games we share.
A Vision of Games as Shared Human Technology
Ultimately, Of Floating Isles expands readers’ sense of connection. It invites readers to see their own experiences with games reflected back at them, to recognize how digital worlds shape our understanding of race, gender, and power, and to consider how games may offer new ways of thinking about identity. The memoir argues for a more inclusive, globally aware view of gaming—one that acknowledges the medium’s radical potential across cultures and generations.
What’s Next for Guillermo
Beyond Of Floating Isles, Kawika Guillermo has multiple projects on the horizon. They will be discussing the memoir at the Vancouver Public Library on November 5 and are preparing Domesticating Brown, a work under their patrilineal name, Christopher Patterson, slated for release in March. This project applies critical race theory to the intersections of art, technology, and colonialism, signaling Guillermo’s continued commitment to examining how media shapes our lives and how we might reshape those media to foster justice and understanding.
First online Oct. 11, 2025, midnight
