Let’s Play: On Video Games with Kawika Guillermo

September 3, 2025

“Like old friends, games hold certain parts of ourselves: the selves we cherish, the selves we keep secret, and the selves we have learned to let go.”

Vinh Nguyen interviews Kawika Guillermo about their collection of personal essays, Of Floating Isles.

Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author whose books include Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press), Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir (Duke University Press), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (NYU Press). They co-edited the anthology Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press) and designed the game Stamped: an anti-travel game (Analgesic Productions). They have lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae, Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. They currently teach game studies at the University of British Columbia.

From the publisher:

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.

VN: I know you often get asked, “what is a video game?” But I want to start with why – why video games? What is the fascination for you and for millions of people around the world? Why write an entire book centered on playing video games?

KG: This is a crucial question, because asking “why” video games pushes past many of the shames we have about playing them. When gamers reach for a game, we don’t typically wonder why we’re doing it, in the same way we might when reading a book, which feels like a more deliberate act. Unlike reading, or watching classic cinema, we aren’t encouraged to think about the many reasons we play video games. But once we ask this question, the answers are overwhelming, and often very personal. Sometimes I play games because I want to care for someone in a game, or because I want to feel anger and distress in a safe way, or to better understand war and violence in our world by simulating it within a virtual world. 

Mostly, I feel we play games because they resonate with something in our daily lives, something we are struggling with, or a transformative event we are experiencing. We are challenged daily with both personal and political struggles. We attempt to understand our partners through roleplaying games about teamwork and partnership like Baldur’s Gate III or Dragon Age: Inquisition. We try to understand the experiences of refugees with games like This War of Mine (a game about civilians surviving war), Path Out (an autobiographical game about escaping Syria during the civil war), and Liyla and the Shadows of War (a game about a Palestinian family). 

In Of Floating Isles, I consider how games give us a form of accompaniment, joining us through the trials of childhood, the passions of youth, and the dread of adulthood. Completing a video game can typically last far longer than watching a film, TV show, or reading a book. And many gamers end up playing the same game for many years, sometimes even decades (like the persistent players of Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft). Like old friends, games hold certain parts of ourselves: the selves we cherish, the selves we keep secret, and the selves we have learned to let go.

VN: You make the provocative assertion that games are “poetry of the digital age.” Could you elaborate on this for our readers? 

KG: I see games as poetry in two senses. In the first, I lean on an ancient Greek definition of poetry that could be used to define oral and written arts including fiction, which is that poetry is ultimately an entertaining and sometimes seductive lie, while other forms of speech—in this case, rhetoric—are expected to hold factual and historical truths used to educate. For me, this resonates with the way we see video games emerging alongside the internet. Video games are labeled as a fictional and frivolous way of engaging with the digital technologies of the internet, while political websites and social medias are expected to provide education and truth in some form. Of course, we know now in the age of overtly curated media, cyber-trolls, deepfakes and AI delusions that the internet is no more educational than the rhetoric of a politician trying to please their donors. Video games, like poetry, can actually express unspoken truths about our digital age, precisely because they are not seen within the political spectrum of truth. 

Building on this, video games are also poetic because of how they help us understand our relationship to digital devices. Just as the best poetry defamiliarizes us with language, exposing the presumptions, violences, and potentials of our everyday words and grammar, video games too defamiliarize us with our digital world. Games contain speculative artworks that understand the technologies of the internet and, through its own apparatus, rupture our relationship to them.

Take the game To the Moon, a game where two scientists, using memory-altering technology, are tasked to fulfill an old man’s dying wish to go “to the moon.” But in order to fulfill their contractual obligation, they must also erase the role of his wife, River, from his memories. As we play through the dying man’s memories, we begin to learn that his wish to “go to the moon” was not a literal wish to be an astronaut, but a metaphor for love and yearning that came from conversations with River. For digital technology to fulfill its promises, it must destroy the very deep, human longings that created those promises. Poetry helps us understand the moon not as a place to venture, but a symbol of love and yearning. So too, games help us see our own technology as far more than a means for getting to the moon, but as a deeper way of understanding the dreams, longings and memories we carry for each other.

VN: Your writing is so layered; you weave together history, criticism, memoir, and ekphrasis in this book. What was the process of finding a structure for your ideas? 

KG: I was inspired by authors of creative essays like W.E.B. Du Bois, Gloria Anzaldúa, Saidiya Hartman, Jia Tolentino, Cathy Park Hong, Teresia Teaiwa, and Carmen Maria Machado. My previous books have been in fiction, poetry, and academic writing, and I’ve dabbled in personal essays. But I have remained inspired by writers who can weave genres together, and somehow never lose their audience, and make it look easy. From what I could see, no one had attempted to take on a similar writing style focusing on video games. I thought doing so could be a powerful way to show how games connect to the many facets of our lives—political, social, cultural, personal, and our deepest imaginings.

I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off and I spent about a year struggling  with the style. A change came when I was on my sixth draft of the Intro, and nothing had worked. I had exhausted myself trying to write a certain way, so I just went for something really weird. I decided to write about the indie game The Path, inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, where you play as six different girls. I used the story of each girl to introduce something different about games and the way they impact us, building to this idea of “Floating Isles” - the realms of imagination and desire that games help create. I thought it was another throw-away draft, but somehow, it worked. After that, I kept leaning more into the more kooky, eccentric ideas for bringing different ideas together.

In the conclusion I talk about this writing style, naming it Machphrasis, poetic prose inspired by the machinations of video games. I am very thankful to my agent during this time, and to my fellow readers and friends, who did not hold back their criticisms. 

VN: So much of this book is about death and about living. It delves into this game of life, one we all end up exiting. What do video games teach us about life? 

KG: A great deal, as games guide many of us through our biggest life changes. But if you ask the typical gamer about what games have meant to them, they are often filled with so much shame and suspicion that they end up repeating the easiest (and less true) answer: I just play them because they’re fun. Writing Of Floating Isles gave me a chance to cast off this shame, to be introspective, and to see myself and my own habit of playing games as something integral to my life. I found that in all the transformative moments of my life—leaving my religion, realizing my queerness, leaving the United States, becoming politicized by researching my own background—games were there, influencing not merely my decisions but the ways I went about making them.

Games give us a form of compulsive aggrievement, where the decisions we make in games inevitably push against some form of injustice in the world. And games often show this injustice to you every step along the way. When I began to understand my own sexuality for example, I was very religious at the time, and games helped me realize the parts of my life that were irreconcilable, and the institutions (in this case, my evangelical church) that were hindering my own sense of self-worth. 

In Of Floating Isles, I use the Final Fantasy game series as an example of games that helped me understand my own sexuality, queerness, and my grief for lost loved ones. The grand narratives of Final Fantasy games usually include a scrappy band of bards and magicians who rebel against an overwhelmingly powerful and evil empire. Through these games, my understandings of myself were always within a greater context of the powers that were against me: the state-sanctioned histories of Filipino colonization, the capitalist individualism that had me working minimum wage with no healthcare, the fears of so-called “terrorists” that were meant to make me complicit in war and genocide. For me, games not only taught me who I was, but what I was fighting against.

VN: Tell us a game you’re playing right now and why. 

KG: I’ve recently finished Butterfly Soup 2 by Briana Lei, the sequel to Butterfly Soup, a romantic sports visual novel about queer Asian-American teens falling in love, talking about video games, playing baseball, and being very messy while doing it. 

Butterfly Soup 2 feels like a true sequel, one that does not rely on the novelty that made the first game great (a queer Asian gamemaker writing about queer Asian characters!). While playing I constantly felt an immense relief, as telling this story could have gone a number of disappointing ways. But Butterfly Soup 2 rolls with the story without ever seeking spectacle, and it feels like a gift to those of us who did not feel amused by its characters but rather identified with them, even their messier moments: their self-hate, their nascent homophobia and racism, their unresolved tensions between their past, their parents, and themselves. None of the characters feel like caricature, including the antagonists, who we might say are the parents. Because we have seen these parents before, and will likely be seeing them again, we don’t allow them to sink into a mere anti-queer, transphobic Asian parent. We must deal with them, see them as humans with their own struggles and their own reasons to treat their kids the way they do, even if those reasons are embedded in patriarchal and colorist societies.

Butterfly Soup 2 gives us a form of accompaniment, of feeling in community with the queer youth by allowing the moments of celebration to wash over, giving us instead those sparse moments after the parades when we’re merely in community with each other: gossiping, trying on outfits, cleaning up the mess, calling each other out, owning up to our own faults, and yes, making out. That, for me, is a level of queer representation that no other game I’ve played has yet to attain. 

VN: Convince a non-gamer or someone who might be biased against video games to read this book!

KG: This book isn’t trying to convert anyone to play games, but to show their poetic beauty, the way games help us create floating isles where we can breathe and reflect. 

The art of making games, like poetry, has become more and more democratic, with a wide availability of games from queer and trans designers, refugees, activists and organizers, and from occupied peoples subjected to acts of massacre and genocide. In Hong Kong, for example, organizers protesting the encroachment of the People’s Republic of China created games like Yellow Umbrella and Liberate Hong Kong to share knowledge and tactics. Once protests were made illegal, these organizers then took to virtual protests in the game Animal Crossing.

Games shape how many of us see the world and interact with it, but rarely do we understand them as such. I hope Of Floating Isles changes the way we think about games, and write about them. Games act upon us, but through games, we act upon the world.

Vinh Nguyen is an educator and writer. He is the author of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Vinh edits for nonfiction for The New Quarterly.