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Kawika Guillermo, "Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games" (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in store, online and in the app because your personal best is greater than any when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com Lowe's knows how to get you ready for holiday hosting with up to 35% off select home decor and get up to 35% off select major appliances. Plus members get free delivery hallway, basic installation Parts and a two year Lowe's Protection Plan when you spend $2,500 or more on select LG major appliances valid through 10. One member offer excludes Massachusetts, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Florida installed by independent contractors exclus. See lowe's.com for more details. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books and Game Studies, your game research podcast channel on the New Books Network. Here we dive into exciting new book releases that explore digital and analog games, their design, cultural impact, and the social and economic forces shaping the gaming landscape of today and the past and maybe the future. I'm your host, Rudolf, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Neu Ulm, Germany. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover. Also, feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming groups. And now let's turn to today's conversation and I'm really excited. I'm very delighted to welcome Kawika, author of Off Floating Isles on Growing Pains and Video Games published by Arsenal Pulp. That's Arsenal Pulp Press Kawika, welcome to the show.
- [02:45]
A
Hi Rudolph. It's amazing to be here. I've been a big fan of the show for a while. I think I've seen maybe every episode and I think I have given that five star review. So I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
- [03:01]
B
Well, for Reference for all our future guests. Now, this is motivation. So. Well, to start us off, could you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners and share what inspired you to write off floating alts? What personal or professional turning point made you want to explore games in such a deeply reflective and intimate way?
- [03:25]
A
Right. So I'm Kawika Guillermo, and I write under my matrilineal name. This is the name my mother wanted me to have, and she's Filipina, coming from, based in Hawaii. And my other name that I write as, which just might be more familiar to listeners of the show, is Chris Patterson. Where I wrote the books. Well, I got a few books, but I wrote the main book about games that I wrote was Open World Empire, Race Erotics and the Global Rise of Video Games. And then another book that I co edited with the scholar Tara Fickle, which also we were interviewed by you on this show, was Made in Asia. Why Video Games Were Never Really About Us. And so this book is more of a kind of creative nonfiction project that I've been working on basically since Open World Empire came out. And I was just getting a lot of questions about, like, my own personal relationship to games. And the more I kind of dug into that and thought about it, the more I realized I had a lot to say. And. Yeah. And so I just kind of like started to tell more and more stories from people who were asking and then collaborating with Tara. And I think we had like 25 scholars or something like that and 20 something game makers for that other project, the Mid in Asia America Project. And so just thinking with a lot of the others in this community about what games have meant to us, game makers and scholars and, you know, journalists as well, I came more into understanding that I could write something like this and really wanted to. So the book kind of partially came as if as some of the conversations from those books. And we all kind of begin to realize together that we didn't really know what games were. People would ask us all the time, and they just seem like so unwieldy to have any kind of definition or ongoing concept. And what we think of games has also changes so radically. Like talking to game makers, to journalists, to scholars, you know, what we tend to think games are and what games do and what game cultures are like. It's all just so varied. And so I tended to. I tend to agree now with like, Bo Ruberg, who says that, like, whatever video games are is just the thing that we're calling video games right now. It's just kind of not necessarily Giving up on trying to have like a one firm rigid definition, but just knowing that whatever we say is probably going to change. And I wanted to lean into that indefinability because I think when something kind of feels unanswerable, that almost makes it for me a lot more interesting. But also like something that you can write about outside of an academic framework, because academic writing is more about trying to find answers to things. But I find like non fiction or creative writing is more about getting to the right questions and just kind of dwelling in those questions. And so I was thinking like, if we don't really know what games are because they're such global products and you know, they can always be satirical as well as indoctrinating and so on, I can at least try to figure out what games have meant to me, you know, and what games have done in my life and the ways that they've influenced me and changed me. And so I thought that that was a good place to start. And I hadn't really read any books about that particularly, I think maybe Tom Bissell's book comes close. A lot of games, journalism and video essayists do a lot of that work, but I couldn't think of a book that did that over a lifetime. And a lot of things also define my life that's different from other books about games, such as Queerness, leaving my very indoctrinating religion behind at an early age and having people in my life who have passed away. And so I wanted to kind of just write very frankly about how games kind of accompany me through all those moments. And if, you know, maybe they, that people, readers will kind of feel the same, you know, so we can't really say games do this thing definitively, but we can say like, here's how they've been active within our own lives.
- [07:51]
B
Yeah, this actually builds a perfect bridge to the next question because your book now, it interweaves memoir, cultural critique and even poetic reflection. And I was wondering, how did you find the right balance between personal storytelling, your journey as a queer, mixed race gamer, grandson of preacher, scholar and father, and the broader critique of games and culture?
- [08:15]
A
Right, Yeah, I mean, I think game scholars are always kind of trying to combine a lot of these things perhaps subconsciously without really stating it outright. You know, like we are always writing from our positionalities. And I just got kind of, I think I had to write about games almost like as a more abstract academic thing before I could then kind of reflect on how the way I was writing about them was already so invested, you Know, and already from my own position, of all these things that you say, like being queer, mixed race gamer, grandson of preachers, scholar, father, all those things. And so I just kind of began to reread my own work and try to figure out how did all those things, how did it come out of all those things? And I realized I had been doing it from an early age because I've always been writing about games. I compare it to, like, the practice of aftercare. Like, after having a kind of, like, sexual experience or BDSM kind of experience, there's always an aftercare where you try to, like, figure out what went wrong, what went right, and how, like, your pleasures and desires were either, like, met or not met, or maybe met too much, you know, and you realize you don't actually want those things. So I would always do that with games. Like, after playing games, I would write about them in some way. And in 2016, I wrote a blog post that would try to be a kind of manifesto for game writing. And I don't think many people read it at the time. It was called the art of MacPhrasis. And so I use this term, macphrasis to kind of from machinima, machine cinema, a genre of filmmaking that uses video game cameras and engines. But I called MacPhrasis partly because of the word ekphrasis being meaning an art of poetry, usually that represents something visual, like painting or sculpture or photograph, and is like this technique of trying to write about a photograph or a painting through a kind of poetry or prose that doesn't try to, like, define what that thing is or analyze it even, but just shows, like, all the different worlds that that thing opens up. And so I wanted to write about games kind of in that similar way. And so I use this word, macpheresis. I call it prose inspired by the machinations of video games. The universes, their puzzles, their social and physical systems of logic, their rules and boundaries, their emotional resonances. And I basically, like, just kept honing that, like, trying to write that way for many years. And like I said, I don't think anybody really read the blog post at that time. But eventually it has kind of made its way around. Somebody wrote their dissertation based, you know, using those terms. I think Nac Frasis is like the main title of that dissertation. And then also folks in the creative writing world have been using it, and so I feel like it's gotten some use. And I try to do that throughout the book. I try to think about what are games opening up for us, how do they create worlds that we can kind of return to and use to reflect on our own transformations in life? I'm not, of course, the only person doing anything like this. There's so many amazing game journalists and authors and youtubists and people like that out there. But I wanted to have a kind of very intentional way of writing about games that I just hadn't really seen done before. And I really hope that it does kind of change the way that we write about games because I do feel like games are somewhat special in the way that they bombard us with so many different kinds of things happening at once. Right. And the way that we interpret them is so subjective and they open up so many different things in us depending on who we are and what's going on in our life. And that's just something that's so hard to articulate, I think, in academic writing. And I hope, you know, we can kind of all take a bit of a step back and try to understand, you know, given our own experiences with games.
- [12:16]
B
Jesus Christ. We already have reached half halftime for our show today. So on to the next question. There are so many good questions in the soul. You have so much interesting stories to tell.
- [12:25]
A
I try to keep things briefer. Thank you.
- [12:28]
B
Because the next question actually was my favorite question for today because I'm very interested in community setups and community building within games. So one of the striking aspects of loading Isles is how it reframes gaming not as social isolation, but as a search for belonging, for community, even on those so called floating isles. So please tell me more about this redefinition of the gamer's retreat then.
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A
Right? Yeah, I mean, I was inspired by a lot of other authors who have written about games as islands. Colin Milburn, for example, in one of his books talks about games as like these isolated experimental spaces. And I think that's, you know, that's an interesting way to look at them. But I always, I never was able to really understand that. Like I grew up with a twin brother and a sister and. And then eventually my sister had a son. So we ended up playing games a lot with my nephew. And they just never seemed like isolated things to me. And even today, like I just started playing Baldur's Gate 3 like a couple weeks ago because I knew I'd get addicted if I started playing it any earlier. So I needed to like make sure I had enough time. And the first thing I did was just like text people I know who had played that game and just talk to them about it like before I even really started playing it. And so I've always thought of games as this kind of communal thing, but not to say that they're not separated from what we think of as the real world. I think the way that we imagine games as being a different thing, a different space, is also really crucial to creating these kind of communal spaces. And I think since Gamergate and this kind of realization that gaming communities are really diverse and there is not just one type of gamer or one type of community nowadays, like, I feel like it's much more accepted that people play games as a kind of social activity, that they're not trying to escape something. And I like the term isles because it's different from, like, isolated islands, right, where you try to, like, practice some kind of utopic version of, like, you know, humanity. But in isles in literature, like Gulliver's Travels or. Or the Odyssey or something like that, like, isles are kind of, like, mystical things that we're supposed to be kind of afraid of. Adventure, you know, places where we have these adventures, but end up confronting very real, you know, inequalities of the world. Racism, colonialism, enslavement, exploitation. Right. I feel like in literature and a lot of different media aisles have this completely different way of confronting us with things in the way that islands don't. The islands are, like, isolated and. Yeah. So I feel like I wanted to use that term. And also they're floating, because that's just something we see constantly in video games, you know, since I was thinking of, like, Sonic the Hedgehog or Mario games. And it's just there, you know, it's not something that we're meant to, like, question at all, like, how these things are floating. And I think that's also part of what makes them so, like, unique is that they have their own kind of genre conventions that seem completely illogical. But any gamer could kind of think of, you know, can think of many, many different floating aisles that they've been on and how that can work as a kind of metaphor for the ways that we see games not as places of escape, but places where we just play with each other and reflect and dwell, you know, and understand ourselves differently.
- [16:05]
B
On the other hand, the book also suggests that games are not only joyful escapes, but also sources of rage, confusion, and even grief. What you call growing pains. How do you see games functioning as both catalysts for these difficult emotions and a space of even healing and resilience?
- [16:26]
A
Yeah, I use the term growing pains not only because it rhymes with the word video games in the subtitle. But that's one reason. But the other reason is I think games have this way of, like, making things making very painful, like, hurtful, like, truthful, real things in our world, you know, like making them a bit softer, easier to approach, you know, even cute. Or, like, using kind of Japanese or like, what I call in some work Asiatic kind of styles in order to make things like, you know, massacre, genocide and war very approachable. But then once you start to get into a game like that, eventually the. You know, I'm thinking of a game like Cult of the Lamb. It's a very cute game where you end up indoctrinating and sacrificing a lot of people. But at the same time, I think that when those things happen, it's very disarming in games because we've kind of come into this game as a cute, fun thing. And so I try to use that throughout the book, this idea of, like, you know, you can approach each chapter with this kind of more, like, optimistic attitude, but then what happens in it can be quite disarming. And so growing pains for me is a lot of things that have happened in my life, including, you know, death of loved ones, a lot of loss, the. My own kind of suicidal ideation that I went through mostly as a teenager in my early 20s, disillusionment with, you know, the world and especially the United States as a kind of imperial power in the world. And, you know, I'm Filipino. And so that's also like, learning about my own history of migration, not as, like, you know, an immigration story where we're trying to find something better, but more as a story of, you know, war and death and colonization. And so I think those growing pains, you know, include a lot of things personally, socially, and politically. And one of the games that I really tried to focus on, to talk about all of those things, is the game morrowind, Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind, which for me is like, you know, all takes place on the island. So it's an interesting metaphor again, to use to explore a space that's also, like, might be so seen as, like, so ugly to a lot of people. Like, it's a swampy, you know, very gray, drab kind of island. And you spend the whole game kind of just exploring this drab space and not being able to see very far because there's this in game fog that covers up most everything too. And then almost everybody you meet in the game are horrible. They're either trying to smuggle drugs through somebody else's body or something. Like that, or they're just trying. It's just really, really amazing game, actually. And I think when I was going through a lot of really difficult times, I would return to that game because it felt like more real than the real world at times. Like you could go and just see how horrible this place was. And there was something like, very beautiful about that, I think, like, in your ability to survive and to like keep going in a place like this. And, you know, if you can keep going in Morrowind, then you can kind of keep going in real life. And I kept that kind of, to me, in a lot of difficult moments.
- [19:46]
B
Yeah. You describe games as forms of poetic interaction too, that can guide us through loss, hardship and identity struggles, while also exposing real world injustices. So can you share an example from the book where a game became such a transformative lens, especially for you?
- [20:10]
A
Yeah, immediately I think of the introduction, because the intro, I actually wrote the first chapter first, which is about kind of discovering my own neurodivergence. But then I wrote the introduction with an editor and they really believed in the project, but they also continually believed that I wasn't hitting the right notes and that I was not writing it good enough. So they were very hard on me. And so in the introduction, I wrote it probably like nine or ten times, rewrote it. And what really changed in the end was I added or I. I used the game, the path. This 2009 game, that's. That is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood where you play as six different, like, Little Red Riding Hood characters, you know, girls who are going through different experiences at different times in their life. And so when you play this game, like, it's a very poetic game. And the people who made the game also wrote this amazing manifesto that I always use in my classes, the Real Time Art Manifesto, which also defines games as poem. And so this game in the past, I feel like it's just very ambiguous, has no plot intentionally, has no plot really. And you can just interpret what's happening in so many different ways. And one way that I really brought out to me was that each of these characters represents different approaches to games and different ways that games can all can, you know, influence us as these, like, youthful people who are looking for, like, different, completely different things. So one of the Reds, whose name is Ruby is like very nihilistic, for example. And that's also an approach that a lot of gamers have, you know, of being almost like just wanting violence and bad things to happen. But so each of the girls for me, like, represented a different way of seeing games, a different way that we engage with games, but also ways that games, like, are very political and social and influence us. And so the end of each of these stories, each of these characters, you know, comes across their own version of the Big Bad Wolf. And the Big Bad Wolf also feels like a very game like thing. Like, sometimes it's a wolf that you can actually play with, which is very dangerous. Obviously, sometimes the wolf is like this ethereal being that's levitating over a lake and things like that. All of these kind of reminded me of, like, the things that games can do that are special and transformative and somewhat dangerous. And not to say that like dangerous and like they could create, you know, violence kind of way, but dangerous in the way that like, any formative, like, transformative experience in our life can be. And so I try to hold that throughout the book. This idea that games can transform us or be there for us during transformative moments and what we come out as is not necessarily something that we know. It's always going to be a bit of a mystery.
- [23:09]
B
Before we continue to our last question, here's a quick message for our listeners. If you're involved in running an academic program in game design development or game studies, this podcast might be just the right place to. To share your vision. Our audience includes engaged scholars, educators, students, and professionals across the field. Consider placing a short promotional segment here to highlight your program and connect with a thoughtful international community passionate about games and research. And now back to the show. Writing such a personal hybrid collection must have been both rewarding and challenging at the same time. So what was the most difficult part of you for opening up so vulnerably about your very life through the lens of games? And what was the most rewarding aspect of that process?
- [24:01]
A
I think part of what was very rewarding about it, I mean, it was very difficult to do. I wrote a book before this called Nimrod's what is it called? A Fake Punk Self Anti Memoir with Duke University Press. And it's. It was very like, you know, anti memoir. It was, but it was trying to get at certain truths about God and patriarchy in my own life. But because I had written that book, I was kind of ready to delve even more into these things. I had thought so much about things that had happened in my life, so I was kind of already there in terms of vulnerability. But the payoff and the reward for this book was really interesting to me because I didn't really know what it was going to be. I just knew I wanted to write in this different style, try to answer these different questions, or try to like, not answer, but dwell on these different questions. And what could I do that like, I, as an academic, you know, academic writing could not do? And I still didn't really know even after I finished the book. I was like, I think it's really different. I'm not really sure what it is. But then a lot of the early conversations I had with like, friends and other scholars who I had given copies of the book to, a lot of them focused on different chapters about like, how this thing that I try to explain in this chapter, they could never find in academic writing, but it's just there and so like obvious and, and so meaningful but also so complicated. And like, one example that I'll go back to because I was just talking to one of my friends about this chapter is chapter four, which is about the. Is it chapter. Yeah, chapter three, sorry, chapter three. About the war on terror and Counter Strike and how a lot of us were playing this game, Counter Strike, at the same time, you know, the Twin Towers fell as the war on terror began and this like, infrastructure of Islamophobia really started to like, come together and take hold, especially in the United States in a way that it's, you know, obviously never let go of. And so I think I could never really write that much about Counter Strike, though. I was. I've talked to the creators and, or one of the creators, Min Le, and I've, you know, tried to write about it before. But what was so interesting about trying to write that chapter is like, we were brown, you know, people of kids of color who didn't have a lot of money, who were, you know, sometimes the, like the victims of the war on terror and that like, people would see us and our being as, you know, non human and would treat us as such. White supremacists, white nationalists, for example. And at the same time we were constantly playing this game and finding so much like relief and community in this game where basically you are like shooting and finding terrorists. And this game became Counter Strike became so famous for that. At the same time we found so much about ourselves in this community. We were also so exclusive in the way that we operated. And you know, the community itself was so misogynistic, you know, so it's just one of those things that like, it's so hard to explain that period and what we were going through and what it was like, especially in academic terms because, you know, there was nothing, I don't know what I would argue like, I don't know what that shows exactly. It just shows that, you know, for me that games are really complicated things that we don't really, you know, we can't really say what they're doing or definitively try to talk about, you know, what was Counter Strike doing at that time. Yeah, and now I go, you know, I spent the last year on sabbatical traveling around Asia and places like Turkey. And in Turkey they still like Counter Strike is still everywhere. You know, in this like predominantly Muslim country. It's like one of the most present video games. You know, there's Counter Strike memorabilia you can buy and still in like Korea, there's still Counter Strike at all the and of course it's come back now because of the Counter Strike new Counter Strike. But this is before the new one came out. And so it was just like mind boggling how this game gets received in such different ways. And just trying to talk about that was for me almost impossible in academic writing, but came forth and I think really feels very rewarding in that I could express things that I couldn't otherwise. And I hope readers get a lot out of that.
- [28:19]
B
Kawike, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your reflections on Of Floating Isles. Dear readers, it's a truly captivating book that broadens how we think about games and our relationships to them. So please go get it. It's really a great one.
- [28:38]
A
Yeah, it's such a pleasure to be here. And I do just want to say the book is also going to be available very soon, an audiobook narrated by myself. And I'm just hoping because you have podcast listeners that those listeners might prefer the audiobook. And I worked really hard on it and put a lot into it, so I really hope that listeners enjoy it. Yeah, I'm really excited actually, just to have that come out and see how it might change the way that we read the book.
- [29:06]
B
Yeah, it might even be a first one right here premiere, so to speak, because I really can't remember whether this had happened before in our book range. So yes, great, great.
- [29:21]
A
I'm proud to be one of the first. Yes.
- [29:24]
B
Dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you are an author or editor in game studies and would like to discuss your latest work, please reach out@rudolf.inderstooglemail.com you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky under amestudies. And don't forget, head over to gamestudiesmerch.de for a game studies hoodie. If you want to support the show, keep it playful and goodbye.
- [30:03]
A
Yo, this is important, man. My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pace breakers. The ones with all the pockets. Well, I just got got back from vacation, and I think I left them in my hotel room. And dude, I need to replace these shorts. I wear them, like, every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me. Could you send me the link to where you got them? Thanks, bro. Talk soon. Looking for your newest Go to's shop, Lululemon's bestsellers now@lululemon.com.