Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name of Chris Patterson, Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute (GRSJ).
Congratulations to Kawika Guillermo, who will be launching their most recent book, Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) at the Vancouver Public Library on November 5, 2025. All are invited to join them for the launch (RSVP details below).
Hear it from the Author
Note: the following quote is a selection from an interview with V.S. Wells in the Georgia Straight.
My latest book is Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games, a mixture of memoir, cultural critique, and stories about the transformative possibilities of video games. The book was published in September by Arsenal Pulp Press, and should soon be available as an audiobook, narrated by myself!
I am in love with this book, and I love seeing the way it impacts readers. I truly hope the book changes the way we think and write about games by envisioning them as forms of truthful, poetic interaction that can offer guidance in times of hardship, and can reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our “real” world.
“I truly hope the book changes the way we think and write about games by envisioning them as forms of truthful, poetic interaction”
About the Book
From Arsenal Pulp Press (2025).
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.
Press and Praise for Of Floating Isles
CBC Books | 45 Canadian nonfiction books to read this fall
The Hamilton Review of Books | Let’s Play: On Video Games with Kawika Guillermo
New Books in Game Studies Podcast | Kawika Guillermo, “Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games”
The Georgia Straight | Well Read: Kawika Guillermo, author of Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games
