Of Floating Isles: a book on growing pains and video games

Abstract

This talk introduces Of Floating Isles, a forthcoming collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, 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 forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.

Bio

Christopher Patterson (they/he) is an award-winning author whose books include Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literatures of the Transpacific (Rutgers University 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), among others. They co-edited the anthologies Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press) and Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington 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.