Understanding Kids, Play, and Interactive Design : How to Create Games Children Love

This book is a way of sharing insights empirically gathered, over decades of interactive media development, by the author and other children’s designers. Included is as much emerging theory as possible in order to provide background for practical and technical aspects of design while still keeping the information accessible. The author's intent for this book is not to create an academic treatise but to furnish an insightful and practical manual for the next generation of children’s interactive media and game designers.

Key Features

• Provides practical detailing of how children's developmental needs and capabilities translate to specific design elements of a piece of media
• Serves as an invaluable reference for anyone who is designing interactive games for children (or adults)
• Detailed discussions of how children learn and how they play
• Provides lots of examples and design tips on how to design content that will be appealing and effective for various age ranges
• Accessible approach, based on years of successful creative business experience, covers basics across the gamut from developmental needs and learning theories to formats, colors, and sounds

Mark Schlichting is a publisher, author, and digital pioneer of children's multimedia and interactive design software. He is best known as the creator and subsequent Design and Art Director of Brøderbund's Living Books series, one of the first lines of children's interactive book software on CD-ROM.[1] Schlichting was Design and Art Director for Living Book’s first interactive CD-ROM book adaptation, Mercer Mayer’s Just Grandma and Me, which was one of the first software titles accredited as a school textbook and used as a product demonstration by Apple CEO John Sculley