Ow When

Understanding Kids, Play, and Interactive Design

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

Tatterdemalion

THE GREY ANGEL Her predilection for things French came from childish recollections of school-days in Paris, and a hasty removal thence by her father during the revolution of '48, of later travels as a little maiden, by diligence, to Pau and the then undiscovered Pyrenees, to a Montpellier and a Nice as yet unspoiled. Unto her seventy-eighth year, her French accent had remained unruffled, her soul in love with French gloves and dresses; and her face had the pale, unwrinkled, slightly aquiline perfection of the 'French marquise' type—it may, perhaps, be doubted whether any French marquise ever looked the part so perfectly. How it came about that she had settled down in a southern French town, in the summer of 1914, only her roving spirit knew. She had been a widow ten years, which she had passed in the quest of perfection; all her life she had been haunted by that instinct, half-smothered in ministering to her husband, children, and establishments in London and the country. Now, in loneliness, the intrinsic independence of her soul was able to assert itself, and from hotel to hotel she had wandered in England, Wales, Switzerland, France, till now she had found what seemingly arrested her. Was it the age of that oldest of Western cities, that little mother of Western civilisation, which captured her fancy? Or did a curious perversity turn her from more obvious abodes, or was she kept there by the charm of a certain church which she would enter every day to steep herself in mellow darkness, the scent of incense, the drone of incantations, and quiet communion with a God higher indeed than she had been brought up to, high-church though she had always been? She had a pretty little apartment, where for very little—the bulk of her small wealth was habitually at the service of others—she could manage with one maid and no "fuss."

Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes