The other day a student asked me to explain what World of Warcraft was. We were talking about how universities are using Second Life for an article the student was writing and I referenced WoW as an easier, more familiar game. This is a minor anecdote like so many others that show that students don't always know as much as we think they know, but it points to a larger issues of a critical gaming literacy.
While "language arts" or "English" is taught in middle and high schools and includes literature, film, plays, and basic rhetoric (normally argument and debate in some form or another), gaming hasn't yet hit the mainstream curriculum, leaving more possibilities for literacy gaps. Given that students are interested in games--or even if they aren't, games are part of the transmedia world around them--and many don’t have core gaming knowledge, we need a gaming and game studies primer. The primer needs to connect what they do know to what they don't because many students do have parts of a the core gaming knowledge from other areas or from games, but simply of the games they have played and enjoy and not a critical understanding of the games or gaming elements and how those operate. Jeff Howard's Quests fills that need for a primer as an interdisciplinary text grounded in theory while focused on practice. Quests is an excellent tool for teachers who are new to games and want to use games in their classrooms, for teaching games, media, writing, or other areas that include theory and application. Many other books exist that are excellent for game studies classes and for game creation classes (Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman's Game Design Workshop is in its second edition and it's excellent), but Quests fills the particular niche of classes that often have titles like "introduction to media studies," "writing for new media," "first (or second, or later) semester writing across the curriculum." Quests would also be an excellent choice as a supplemental text for more advanced classes, helping graduate students or faculty connect their research areas to new ways to represent, research, and teach using games.
Quests is a focused, practical book on quests as a core conceptual link between narrative and game that explores the concept through hands-on projects. As such, Quests is like a workbook and could be used as a supplemental or primary text for a variety of courses and uses, especially because it includes links to other online tutorials and references to other game studies works for greater context and research. Those teaching introductory writing or media courses and those wanting to explore games as a factor affecting a particular genre or a similarly focused class will likely be pleased with what they find what in Quests.
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