Kawika Guillermo’s memoir Of Floating Isles opens to the setting of a video game: The Path, a psychological horror experience that subverts the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. In the game, players guide young girls through a dark, open forest, where straying from the path is the only way forward. There is no winning, only wandering, confronting and remembering. Guillermo’s writing mirrors The Path’s gameplay, fully immersing readers in the decision-making process behind self-discovery.
The memoir is structured as a linear personal narrative which connects broader themes of intersecting identities under colonial power structures to video games. The linear storytelling invites readers to join as Guillermo comes to these revelations throughout varying stages of life, often with the help of video games as a locus for self-knowing.
Guillermo grew up in Portland, Oregon as one of only a few people of colour in a predominantly white neighbourhood. They turned to video games as a coping mechanism for feelings of alienation. Exploring this dynamic in Of Floating Isles, they cast the free-floating platforms of classic video games like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog as a metaphor for the feeling of growing up different and the comfort of escapism.
“Like our favourite games … our stories took place upon floating isles,” they write. “With our broken tongues, we shaped these isles into fabled spheres of myth and imagination. From our isles, the people below us — the ground dwellers — were still visible. But they were small, unimportant, distant. Their voices could only reach us in ancient echoes.”
After high school, Guillermo travelled across America and throughout Asia. Their encounters with games and gamers in other cultural contexts showed them a new way of viewing the medium as a radical and subversive force. In China at the time, they write, video games were still an underground, persecuted pastime — the Chinese Communist Party banned certain gaming consoles from 2000 to 2015 — and people from the margins of society congregated around them.
“In Nanjing, I played games with queer friends who revealed to me something that should have been obvious all along: despite their reputation in North America, for most of the world, video games have always been radical. As well, the vast majority of players, like the vast majority of the world, have always been non-white, non-American, and non-Western. These games that we from the West held dear, it turned out, were never really about us.”
Guillermo now teaches in the institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC and leads courses which investigate how video games function as producers of knowledge and culture.
Of Floating Isles also critiques mainstream narratives of video games as a corrupting influence on children through their discussion of “gamer anger” as a moral panic that blamed acts of violence on video games and the people who played them.
“We teenage boys were always made to feel that our anger was exceptional: pathological, dangerous, threatening, as if we were always one nerd rage away from committing a school shooting. And why not believe those stereotypes? The massacres at Columbine and Virginia Tech were both blamed on video games, not on gun laws (or the lack thereof).”
This anger was real, they write — an intended effect of the medium itself and an expression of unease under a repressive and unjust society — but it was pathologized and vilified to the extent that gamers began to internalize their own supposed moral flaws.
“Always, then, my tendency was to repress my anger, an anger that came from social injustice, from the violences of war, from feeling helpless to stop the upticking body counts of young brown men and women, boys and girls [during the War on Terror].”
“The more we understand [games] the more we can actually prepare for what’s coming through games and the ways that other games also offer a lot of new ways of thinking about identity and race,” said Guillermo in an interview with The Ubyssey.
One of the recurring reflective experiences in Of Floating Isles is death. Guillermo’s linking of the loss of loved ones — their first girlfriend, their uncle, their late wife Dr. Y-Dang Treoung — to the treatment of grief and terror in Final Fantasy VII and Subnautica is reminiscent of how one may relate loss to religion or literary thought.
“I would jokingly tell friends, ‘I’m only planning to live long enough to play the new Final Fantasy. If it sucks, I won’t be waiting for the next,’” writes Guillermo of the aftermath of their first girlfriend’s funeral. Though this can be read as a grim joke, it’s this pursuit of survival in the face of death that drives so much of Guillermo’s reflections.
“Losing somebody always feels like the world has ended in some way,” said Guillermo, ”that the world doesn't make sense, but it also provides this opening for you to understand people that have gone through similar things … I find opening yourself up to it really, as my late wife put it in her book, [Landbridge], it expands the arteries of love. You can feel more full and you have this ability to relate to people in a way you never did before, to understand.”
In the same way, Of Floating Isles expands readers' possibility of connection; whether that be having your own experiences with games reflected back to you, or opening your understanding of how games can shape our lives.
Kawika Guillermo has many upcoming events and projects for those who hope to engage further with their work. They are hosting a discussion of their memoir at the Vancouver Public Library on Nov. 5 and they have another book called Domesticating Brown releasing in March under their patrilineal name, Christopher Patterson. It applies critical race theory to the subjects of art, technology and colonialism.
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