Of Floating Isles
eBook - ePub

Of Floating Isles

On Growing Pains and Video Games

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Of Floating Isles

On Growing Pains and Video Games

About this book

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.

This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. This book is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

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Yes, you can access Of Floating Isles by Kawika Guillermo in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Advance Praise for Of Floating Isles
  2. Title page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Introduction Straying from the Path
  6. Chapter 1 Of Floating Isles
  7. Chapter 2 Playing Roles
  8. Chapter 3 War and the Terror of Teenagers
  9. Chapter 4 Final Fantasies
  10. Chapter 5 Would You Like to Continue?
  11. Chapter 6 Pleasures of the Open World
  12. Chapter 7 Game-Sensing the System
  13. Chapter 8 Hair, Hips, and Other Blueprints
  14. Chapter 9 Of Dark Dungeons
  15. Conclusion A Poetics of Interaction
  16. Acknowledgments
  17. Bibliography
  18. About the Author
  19. Notes