In Of Floating Isles (September 2, 2025), Kawika Guillermo masterfully his lifelong relationship with video games with reflections on identity, loss, and belonging. Through vignettes spanning childhood to adulthood, Guillermo explores how games served as both escape and illumination during pivotal moments of his life — from processing family trauma and questioning his sexuality to grappling with suicidal ideation and mourning loved ones.
The narrative moves between personal stories and cultural commentary, examining how games reflect and shape our understanding of race, gender, and empire. Guillermo's experiences as a queer, neurodivergent Filipino American are a lens for exploring how marginalized players find recognition and community through gaming, even as the medium itself wrestles with issues of representation and inclusion.
Particularly moving are Guillermo's accounts of how specific games helped him process grief and loss. His discussion of playing Spiritfarer while caring for his terminally ill wife offers a heartrending meditation on mortality and caregiving. The author's exploration of games like Morrowind and Counter-Strike illuminates how virtual worlds can provide refuge and insight during periods of depression and displacement.
Written in lyrical prose that blends memoir, criticism and theory, Of Floating Isles makes a compelling case for taking games seriously as art. Guillermo's vulnerable reflections on how games have shaped his understanding of self and community offer an important contribution to both games criticism and contemporary memoir.
Previously:
• 'Let's Never Talk About This Again' is a touching memoir about birth, death, and dad's amateur erotica career
• Shrill: Lindy West's amazing, laugh-aloud memoir about fatness, abortion, trolls and rape-jokes
• Can you trust a sociopath's memoir?
• Mother American Night: John Perry Barlow's posthumous memoir
• Comedian Gary Gulman's memoir 'Misfit' is a masterpiece
• Arbitrary Stupid Goal: a memoir of growing up under the tables of the best restaurant in New York
• Little House on the Prairie, serial killers, and the nature of memoir
