An artbook of video game fan art is being put together to help raise money for a Blizzard game artist who is suffering from a rare form of cancer. Kevin Kanai Griffith, who currently works as an artist on Diablo III at Blizzard Entertainment, has been fighting an unusual form of cancer known as Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma (ASPS) for more than 12 months. There's no cure or clear treatment for this type of cancer, which means that treatment options are fairly expensive because they are likely experimental.

Picture this:

Your young child wants nothing more than to play video games with you and the rest of the family but she's nearly blind and can't focus on anything more than a few inches from her face.  She can't see the game unless she puts her nose to the screen and you can't see the game when her head is blocking the TV.  What do you do?

MMO publisher Perfect World Entertainment passed along word that the Community team for its MMO Neverwinter will be hosting a 24-hour Neverwinter marathon live stream on Twitch to raise money for the Child's Play charity. The Neverwinter team will be going non-stop from noon (PT) on Tuesday until noon on (PT) Wednesday, running dungeons, hanging out with players, cracking jokes, and trying to stay awake.

Ryan Green announced that his game about the trials and tribulations of raising a child suffering from cancer is launching exclusively on the OUYA in 2014. Green says that he chose to launch That Dragon, Cancer exclusively on the Android-based platform because the platform holder has pledged to help with development costs and ensure that the game gets made.

Way back in February we reported on the opening of the Sandy Hook Arcade Center, an arcade founded by Andrew Clure and Scott Cicciari, two long-time Newtown residents, who wanted to share their love of pinball with the community in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adult staff members.

Lazy Gamer points out that MineThon 3 is set to kick off beginning on August 2. MineThon is an annual gaming marathon to raise charity for the AbleGamers Foundation. The 72-hour Minecraft gameplay marathon is broadcast live over Twitch and encourages viewers to stop by, make a donation and get a chance to win some cool prizes in the process.

Game-related charity Gaming For Good is offering consumers a chance to buy games in exchange for a charitable donation to Save the Children. The catalog is pretty extensive, offering titles directly from the folks that make them and through digital distribution services such as Desura and Steam.

Mechwarrior Online is honoring a five-year-old player who died of brain cancer in May by selling a special mech, with the proceeds going completely to charity. Earlier this year, five-year-old Sarah Marie Alida Parries of Vancouver (who was a big fan of MechWarrior and played the game with her dad Jon) died from complications with inoperable brain cancer.

Two League of Legends competitive teams have teamed up with eBay to create a charity tournament called the eBay Charity Invitational. The idea for the tournament came from members of League of Legends teams Evil Geniuses and Team Curse. Members of both teams will compete in one-on-one matches, with each player fighting for a charity of their choice. The tournament will take place on July 24 at 8 p.m. ET and will be live streamed on Twitch by One Nation of Gamers.

Peace Games, a charity initiative launching in September to support the UN-affiliated Peace One Day, has put out a call to developers asking them to lend their time and efforts to help raise money. The goal of the program is to reach over 600 million people worldwide via messaging and events across all kinds of different media, including a 24-hour concert live-streamed via YouTube, performed by celebrities backing the cause.

Jennifer Ann’s Group, an Atlanta-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to preventing teen dating violence through "awareness, education, and advocacy;" announced the winners of the 2013 Life. Love. Game Design Challenge. The competition asked participants to create games that raised awareness about teen dating violence and appealed to students. One other key element of all of this year's winners is that they raise awareness about teen dating violence without using any violence in gameplay.

Operation Supply Drop, a charity that creates care packages for servicemen and women on active duty in war zones, managed to create and send 12 care packages to five U.S. military units deployed across Afghanistan and one package to a soldier who was injured in Afghanistan and is currently recuperating at the Walter Reed national military hospital. Collectively, the 12 packages (part of their latest drive for the 4th of July, code named PIXEL FIREWORKS) contained $30,000 in video games, video game systems, and special peripherals donated by AbleGamers.

Operation Supply Drop was hoping to raise $12,000 in video game systems, gear and games for six care packages. Five of these packages will be sent to soldiers deployed in combat zones, while a sixth package will be sent to Walter Reed military hospitals. This fundraising drive, codenamed "PIXEL FIREWORKS," is already a huge success, bringing in almost double what was needed with several days left to go. For this particular initiative the charity has raised right around $24,736.

The AbleGamers Charity has donated multiple customized controllers powered by Evil Controllers to Operation Supply Drop, another charity that gives video-game related care packages to soldiers serving in places like Afghanistan and to injured veterans recovering at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The AbleGamers Charity and Minicore Studios have teamed up to launch a round of grants to purchase assistive gaming technology for gamers of any age with disabilities. This initiative, called the "Summer of Fun program," allows gamers of any age with a disability the ability to apply for a grant to buy assistive technology to aid gaming. The Summer of Fun grant program will be accepting requests for equipment until July 31, 2013.

Organizers of the game-related charity Operation Supply Drop say that its Veterans Day event in November 2012 set the bar extremely high. The charity that sends packages that include games, video game systems, and accessories, received $100,000 in donations for deployed soldiers and soldiers recovering in military hospitals. A lot of the success of the charity drive can be attributed to the generous donations from companies like Capcom.

Gamers in Australia have managed to raise $550,000 for the Starlight Children's Foundation as part of Starlight Week 2013, which took place in 400 EB Games (owned by GameStop) stores in the country April 29 - May 5. The week-long event offered in-store competitions, promotions, and donation drives.

Starlight CEO Louise Baxter expressed his gratefulness to EB and gamers in the country for their hard work and generosity:

Justin Reich from the EdTech Blog has posted a video of the "Play Nice: The Science of Player Behavior" talk given last month by Riots Games' Jeffrey Lin (lead designer of social systems) and Carl "Status" Kwoh (the producer for the player behavior team) at Berkman Center for Internet & Society (at Harvard).

S.O.S. Gamers has launched a crowd-funding campaign for Get Schooled, an initiative that supplies underprivileged schools and community centers in the New York City area with access to educational technology including computers, calculators, and recreational items such as video game consoles and games.

Develop offers an interesting feature on Global Gaming Initiative founder Elizabeth Sarquis, who details why she started the mobile game development studio. GGI will release a new mobile game in May called Sidekick Cycle for $0.99. Sidekick Cycle downhill biking game challenges players to cycle through hazardous levels to deliver bikes to children in need.

Gustavo Zacarias of San Antonio, Texas was one of the winners of the2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge who joined a select group of students that participated today in the third White House Science Fair, an event that emphasizes and celebrates student achievements in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions. The National STEM Video Game Challenge is an annual competition presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media.

The latest Indie Gala bundle offers a bunch of nifty games depending on what you're willing to pay - but the money will go towards "help rebuild Vancouver's game industry" by supporting a political candidate. Vancouver has been hit with a lot of layoffs at many of the region's biggest studios.

Women in Games International (WIGI) and the Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles (GSGLA) are now working together to create the first video game patch for Girl Scouts. Scouts can earn the patch by taking part in a special program put together by both the GSGLA and WIGIIGI using various tools to create a game.

The AbleGamers Foundation has won two award from the Multiple Sclerosis Society (MS Society) for its work on creating guidelines that aid game developers in making their games easier to use for those with various physical disabilities. The MS society has awarded the AbleGamers Foundation two awards including the da Vinci award for best product in communication/educational aids for its Includification game accessibility guidelines, and the Leo for People’s Choice.

The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) announced the theme for its 2013 Youth Free Expression Film Contest. This year’s theme will be "Video Games in the Crosshairs." The non-profit organization goes wherever it is needed to fight against censorship in the United States. After the Sandy Hook School shooting back in December of last year, politicians at the state and federal level started wagging their fingers at video games as a catalyst for the violent act.

Microsoft has launched the Kodu Game Design Challenge for young children, challenging youngsters to use its Kodu Labs game development package available for free on Windows (and for $5 on Xbox Live Indies) to develop a game. Children between the ages of nine and 18 years-old are eligible to compete.

AbleGamers Foundation announced that its Pachinko for Charity event at PAX East 2013 in Boston over the weekend raised $17,022.09! The group dedicated to evangelizing the need for accessibility in video games for all gamers says that supporters came out in droves, waiting as long as 20 minutes to play even while the lines were three or four rows deep.

Activision's Call of Duty Endowment announced plans to open up a number of chapters around the country using $1.1 million in grant money. They are calling this initiative "Chapterization." The Call of Duty Endowment also announced the appointment of its first full-time Executive Director - Dan Goldenberg. Goldenberg has 21 years of active and reserve military service and currently serves as a commander in the Navy Reserve.

The AbleGamers Foundation has been named a finalist in the MS Society Da Vinci awards for its game accessibility guidelines - Includification. Includification is a 48-page fully-illustrated game accessibility guidelines document for developers to make games more accessible to gamers with various disabilities.

A man sentenced to ten years in prison for robbing two men for $110 and their driver's licenses in 1999 spent a good portion of his time playing chess and developing a new puzzle-based game that uses the classic board game to teach children how to make good choices in life. Nkosi Brown said that he spent much of his time in prison playing chess to avoid fighting with guards and other inmates and during his time in solitary confinement he would play chess with other isolated inmates by yelling out moves and using a chess board scrawled onto the floor.