Taxonomic contributions to digital games science

Pondering digital games, in general, and discussing details such as, e.g., innovations of NPC behavior and AI, of interface technologies, of serious games application areas, and the like requires a language of scientific discourse. Contributions to a taxonomy of digital games and of digital game playing are essential preliminaries to a digital games science. There is introduced a canonical taxonomy of digital games which is later on extended toward a comprehensive taxonomy of digital games. Practical work shows the usefulness of the approach whereby emphasis is put on serious games development and applications.