Introduction to the GaLA Conf 2019 Special Issue

It is a great pleasure for us to have the opportunity to introduce this issue of the IJSG, which is dedicated to the Games and Learning Alliance Conference (GaLA Conf) that was held in Palermo, December 5-7, 2018. Almost70 participants converged in this all beautiful, historic, and modern city for a lively workshop and for sharing knowledge and experiences related to serious games, their techniques and their application. A number of the best conference papers were selected, and the authors were invited to extend their paper with at least one-third new content and to submit their paper to IJSG with a regular review process. This issue contains seven selected articles, which gives an overview of the rich field of serious games. So among the topics covered in this issue, there are: -gamification of learning experiences, -serious games in everyday life, -artificial intelligence as a means to significantly increase the effects of serious games, -understanding the effect of learner characteristics on the effects of serious games, -assessing the learning outcomes of serious games systematically, and -games as objects of generative learning approaches.