The third annual Hyrule Hustlers: Zelda Marathon fundraiser for Child’s Play Charity kicks off on Friday, February 14 in Ottawa, Ontario. The multi-day charity event will be broadcast live on Twitch.tv over several days as organizers play through as many Legend of Zelda games as they can and solicit donations from the community at large and viewers via www.hyrulehustlers.com. As the donations increase, the length of the marathon session increases with it.

Game-focused video streaming service Twitch is now one of the five most popular destinations for U.S. internet users, according to an infographic published by Wall Street Journal and highlighted by Twitch marketing VP Matt DiPietro.

MomoCon, an annual Atlanta-based event dedicated to anime, animation, and video games is planning something special for its 10th year in operation: letting the community attend a free and publicly-accessible career fair. The career fair will take place Thursday, May 22nd, at the Hilton Atlanta from 12PM until 5PM EST, ahead of the official MomoCon 2014 event Friday, May 23rd until Sunday, May 25th.

Yale University's Play2Prevent lab is using a grant from the Women’s Health Research at the Yale Pilot Program to create a game that teaches about effective ways to reduce HIV infections among young African American women. The team will spend this year working with groups of black teens and 20-year-olds to design a game that will be "relevant, entertaining and a model for future public health projects."

World of Tanks and World of War Planes maker Wargaming announced today the global launch of an augmented reality application that draws attention to the Dornier 17 aircraft currently being exhibited at the RAF Museum in Cosford, Shropshire, United Kingdom.

A crowd-funding campaign has launched today on Kickstarter to fund Area 5's latest project - a documentary series called Outland on the people and culture of videogames. The details on just what aspects of gaming culture the series will cover is fairly vague, but the group hints at covering some interesting topics like game preservation efforts and movements, and eSports. Area 51 is made up of former 1UP personalities Ryan O'Donnell, Matt Chandronait, Jason Bertrand, Cesar Quintero, and Rick Curnutte.

The Ad Council, the country’s largest producer of public service advertising, has created and released its first in-house game called Toothsavers. The game is designed to encourage children to brush their teeth for at least two minutes, two times a day. The game was developed with the aid and input of Healthy Mouths, Healthy Lives.

While the Chinese government announced last week that it would temporarily lift a 14 year ban on consoles within the region, the rules the country's culture ministries will put in place will make it hard for Chinese gamers to play anything that might be found by government censors to be offensive or culturally unacceptable. What is and isn't offense or culturally acceptable to the Chinese government is unknown because the rules haven't been written yet.

The creator of the game Ultimate Gay Fighter says that his fighting game featuring gay and lesbian characters is not meant to be hateful. Michael Patrick, who identifies himself as gay, says that the "world's first ever gay video game...ever" is not meant to be mean-spirited or derogatory against gay people..

Awesome Games Done Quick 2014, a week-long gaming marathon in which participants speed run through a number of popular games, hopes to raise money for Prevent Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds cancer research and educational efforts. In its fourth year, Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 takes place until January 11. Donations will directly benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Popular YouTube personalities the Yogcast Network managed to raise $1,148,293.91 (or £700,000) in the month of December as part of its Yogscast Dwarven Dairy Drive. The proceeds generated from the charitable event will be divided between several UK charities including Oxfam, War Child, GamesAid, Special Effect and Little People UK.

"We were aiming to reach £300,000 so to get to £700,000 is an incredible achievement and shows how generous gamers in general and Yognau(gh)ts in particular are," said chief executive Mark Turpin.

Child's Play, the charity dedicated to giving sick children in hospitals around the world toys and games to play with while they undergo surgeries of treatments for serious illnesses, announced that it managed to raise a record amount of money in 2013.

Recently the Human Interfaces division of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California released a video on YouTube showing how game-related technologies like Microsoft's Kinect motion sensing hardware and Oculus VR's Oculus Rift headset could be used together to control a robotic arm remotely.

Recently the "Take This Project" was quietly relaunched as "Take This," along with a new website at www.takethis.org. Take This is a support group for gamers (though it doesn't specifically exclude those people who do not identify themselves as gamers), games journalists, game developers, and other industry professionals that suffer from depression, anxiety and other challenges associated with mental illness.

A Buffalo, New York man has found himself in the Guinness World Records 2014 Gamer's Edition for accomplishing something he loves: collecting video games and video game systems. Thirty-one-year-old Buffalo, New York resident Michael Thomasson began collecting games and game systems after receiving his first game, Cosmic Avenger, as a Christmas present from his grandparents when he was 12. Ironically enough, he didn't get to play that game until a year later when his parents could afford to buy the system.

The 11th Annual Games for Change Festival will take place April 22-24, 2014 at New York University's Skirball Center, event organizers announced this week.

Military-focused gaming charity Operation Supply Drop sent along an inspiring note about a recent happening at the Fort Eustis Wounded Warrior Transition Unit. The group stopped by the military medical facility to throw the injured soldiers staying there a pizza party and video game raffle just in time for the holidays. The operation, code named BATTLE WAGON, included the donation of brand new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles on mobile 19" GAEMS Vanguard cases so they can be wheeled into soldier's rooms who are unable to leave their beds.

Microsoft is encouraging Zoo Tycoon Xbox One and Xbox 360 players to help raise money for endangered species with a series of special initiatives. Each month Microsoft will launch a Zoo Tycoon community challenge to raise money to help endangered animals.

2013 was a challenging year for the organizers of the Penny Arcade Expo, mostly due to comments made by its founders that offended many in the community. To try and bring some goodwill back to those injured parties, PAX organizers plan on creating a special area at its events that promote "diversity."

Wargaming passed along word that the Royal Air Force Museum has officially unveiled the German Dornier Do 17 and the associated Wargaming.net Interpretation Zone at its site in Cosford, Shropshire (England).

Yesterday Polygon wrote an excellent article detailing the back story on Operation Supply Drop, the military focused gaming charity that sends video game-related care packages to soldiers deployed in combat zones around the world and recovering in military hospitals.

While EA generates a fair share of bad press on a variety of fronts from time to time, it's hard to deny that the company has a pretty good track record when it comes to workforce diversity and inclusiveness in its various studios. In this year's Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign, the company scored a 100 percent rating. Corporate Equality Index is part of the group's 2014 Best Places To Work report.

The Humble Bundle does not disclose just how much of its regular bundle sales actually goes to charity, but in a blog post this week the company offered a glimpse of how the money it helps raise through bundle sales helps charities. In the post they talk about charity: water, an organization devoted to bringing clean and safe drinking water to poorer countries.

Maximum PC offers an interesting report on a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that uses video games. The government agency’s Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) program hopes to crowdsource formal verification (testing that aims to ensure that software is bug-free and isn’t vulnerable to attack or misuse) with "purpose-built games" called Verigames.

The V&A Museum and Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland are working together to develop new ways to display video games in museums, according to a report in the Scotsman. The two organizations have formed a new research network to work on a project called Video Games in the Museum.

Do you like video games? How about books? How about a bunch of books for as little as $3.00 about video games?

In our latest Letters to the Editor, freelance writer Jon Hochschartner posits that animal rights activists need their own "Bechdel test" to evaluate the mistreatment of animals in video games.

Animal activists need their own rubric to assess anthropocentrism in fictional work that's similar to the Bechdel test employed by feminists to gauge gender bias.

According to a new report released by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) this week, 48 percent of adults age 50 and older say that they play video games. The data comes from new research released by the ESA called "Gamers Over 50 Study: You're Never Too Old to Play." The data in the report is based on a survey of 1,800 adults age 50 and older conducted by the ESRB.

The men and women behind the GaymerX convention have formed a new indie development studio called MidBoss Games and have announced their very first game: Read Only Memories. MidBoss Games has also launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign today to raise funds for ongoing development.

Last week we asked our readers if they had "ever found a video game legitimately scary?" After 541 votes were cast the majority of readers said that they had in fact been scared by one or more games at one time or another. Around 73 percent (395 votes) said that they had played a video game that they found legitimately scary, while 27 percent (146 votes) claimed that they had never played a video game that scared them.