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This International Journal of Serious Games special issue is dedicated to the selected and extended best papers of the 2022 edition of the GALA conference. Professor Kristian Kiili and his team at Tampere University in Finland organized this edition of the conference. Authors of seven highly-rated conference submissions were invited to submit extended papers for this special issue. After peer review process, five extended papers were accepted. These papers shows how game-based learning and serious games continue to evoke extensive research efforts, and clearly demonstrates the breadth of different research approaches used in game-based learning. With such an open-minded approach, it is possible not only to advance our knowledge of game-based learning but also to contribute significantly to the understanding of the factors that influence human learning.

The success of serious games usually depends on their capabilities to engage learners and to provide them with personalized gaming and learning experiences. Therefore, it is important to equip a game, as an autonomous computer system, with a certain level of understanding about individual learning trajectories and gaming processes. AI and machine learning technologies increasingly enter the field; these technologies often fail, however, since serious games either pose highly complex problems (combining gaming and learning process) or do not provide the extensive data bases that would be required. An interesting new direction is augmenting the strength of AI technologies with human intuition and human cognition. In the present paper, we investigated performance of the MAXMIN Ant System, a combinatorial optimization algorithm, with and without human interventions to the algorithmic procedure. As a testbed, we used a clone of the Travelling Salesman problem, the Travelling Snakesman game. We found some evidence that human interventions result in superior performance than the algorithm alone. The results are discussed regarding the applicability of this pathfinding algorithm in adaptive games, exemplified by Micro Learning Space adaptation systems.