The grand prize winner of DICE's 2012 Indie Game Challenge is Closure, a puzzle-platformer developed by Eyebrow Interactive that lets players manipulate light and shadow. The game's developers took home a $100,000 Grand Prize. Puzzle-platformer The Bridge and procedurally-generated musical shooter Symphony won two awards each. Nitronic Rush won the Gamers Choice award, an award chosen by fans.

Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign for the "Double Fine Adventure" game project has surpassed $1 million. Originally they were asking for $500,000 in funding but within eight hours of launching the appeal they had raked in well over $800,000 for a point-and-click adventure game and a documentary to be filmed by 2 Player Productions. Earlier in the day Tim Schafer said that any money over the initial amount would be used to bring the game to other formats.

Indie developer Jeff Vogel (whose Spiderweb Software studio recently released Avadon: The Black Fortress) writes an interesting article for GamaSutra today explaining his philosophy on the most effective method for dealing with piracy. The thrust of his argument is that players will pay for easy-to-pirate games because it makes them feel good about supporting a developer.

Game Developer David Braben (Elite creator) tells Eurogamer that the consumer version of the Raspberry Pi device (a $25 - $35 credit-card sized computer designed to give children of all economic backgrounds the ability to learn important computer skills - will be made available to the public in the third quarter of this year. A pre-order system for the developer version of the Raspberry Pi will be unveiled in the near future, Braben tells Eurogamer.

Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert have proven that using crowd-sourced funding can be successful. Last night the company launched a Kickstarter page asking the community for $400,000 to create a new point-and-click adventure title. Around $300,000 of that will go towards development, while $100,000 of the money will be spent to create a "making of" documentary series about the game by 2 Player Productions.

iRobot makes Roomba, the little circular robot that vacuums your house on its own. But you probably didn't know that that same company makes robots for the military and has done so for quite some time. In fact, iRobot created the PackBot, a robot that the military uses to dispose of bombs. According to Techland, the latest robot created for the military is called "Warrior," and is controlled using an Xbox controller.

Quarrel developer Denki says that its Xbox Live Arcade word game was rejected by several major publishers multiple times. The developers are calling on gamers to prove wrong publishing executives who say that people don't buy word games by buying the game. The multiplayer word game launched on Xbox Live Arcade today.

Artist, game designer, musician and Digital Eel co-founder William R. Sears passed away recently at the age of 58 due to heart trouble. Specific details on the cause of death were not revealed. Better known as "Phosphorous" in the indie game scene, Bill was a core influence on Digital Eel's games - particularly the trippy artistic style of games such as Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, Brain Pipe, Soup de Jour, Dr. Blob's Organism, and many others.

As we mentioned in an earlier story, Marcus Persson has a pretty pragmatic view of piracy, and a recent tweet confirms that attitude. When a Twitter follower asked the developer of Minecraft if he could get a free account to the game instead of resorting to piracy, Notch told him to simply pirate it. From Twitter: 

Epic Games and ChAIR Entertainment announced that Infinity Blade I and II has earned the company more than $30 million in just one year since the introduction of the original game on iOS devices.

Supergiant Games' popular PC and Xbox Live Arcade action-RPG Bastion has sold more than 500,000 copies to date, according to a recent company blog post. Bastion launched for XBLA in July and on Steam in August, and received praise from both critics and players for its unique style and it's wonderful on-the-fly narrative system. The company noted in its blog post that recent price cuts and sales promotions on both platforms helped them attain the numbers they currently enjoy.

Responding to a Formspring question about a potential port to Nintendo's 3DS hand-held, The Binding of Isaac, co-creator Edmund McMillen revealed that discussions are already underway. In responding to the question, McMillen revealed that "a publisher I know is currently asking Nintendo if they would be OK with Isaac on the 3DS." If Nintendo approves of the game being on the platform, he said that he is willing to "let them port it."

VentureBeat has a great profile on Homeless, an Xbox Live indie game that puts you into the well-worn shoes of a homeless person. The basic premise of the game is that you are a homeless guy who must beg for quarters from passers by, trying to get enough money together to get through another day.

Non-profit gamer charity The Ablegamers Foundation has awarded the Disabled Veteran Grant 2011 to three disabled veterans - just in time for the holidays. The group awarded two Xbox 360 gaming systems complete with a one-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold, and one completely customized Xbox controller from Evil Controllers to the recipients of its annual event.

A team of 19 Greek game developers have donated their time and effort to create a videogame for international human rights group, Amnesty International. The game is part of the group's ongoing campaign to raise international awareness about human rights violations and push for the global ban of the death penalty.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is reporting that, beginning in March of 2012, the Louvre in Paris, France will use 5,000 3DS hand-helds to guide its 8.5 million annual visitors through the 35,000 art objects on display. The hand-helds are being supplied by Nintendo as part of a new partnership between the company and the iconic museum.

The 3DS systems the museum will use let visitors locate themselves on the museum's grounds, select from themed tours tailored to both adults and children, and listen to commentary about exhibits in seven different languages.

While Microsoft might not appreciate it too much, Reddit users have found a way to block the ads (which many find to be obnoxious) being served up post-Xbox Live dashboard update. People tired of seeing that Chuck Norris World of Warcraft ad (for the record I love that ad!) in the Xbox Live dashboard got together on Reddit and created two work-arounds. One involves blocking the ad server in your router - assuming that it supports it. Another method is to reroute your traffic with the free OpenDNS service.

Microsoft announced this week that it is taking part in next year's Independent Games Festival, the annual celebration of all things indie game-related that runs in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference. The new partnership with Microsoft adds a new prize to be awarded to the winner of the festival: a first-party publishing deal through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service. The news is part of a multi-year partnership between the Independent Games Festival and Microsoft.

The Sundance Film Festival's official film selections list was released today, and Indie Game: The Movie will be one of the many fine films to be screened and eligible for the World Cinema Documentary Competition. The documentary gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make an indie game. It features Super Meat Boy creators Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, FEZ creator Phil Fish, and the Braid creator Jonathan Blow.

Game, Set, Watch, the alternate game news blog founded by Simon Carless has gone on permanent hiatus today. Simon Carless wrote a lengthy and final post to the site, along with key current and past editors. Carless talks about the people that help put the site on the map some six years ago including current IGF chairman Brandon Boyer, former Kotaku/ now GameTrailers stalwart Michael McWhertor, Gamasutra news director Frank Cifaldi, Alice Taylor, and Game Developer Magazine Editor-in-Chief Brandon Sheffield.

Another week, another Humble Bundle. This time out Introversion's line-up of games are the focal point of the bundle. By choosing to pay what you want (and divvying that money up between the game's developer or the Child's Play or Electronic Frontier Foundation charities), you can get Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON, Multiwinia, and two bonus prototype games - the Voxel Tech Demo and the Subversion City Demo. These are prototypes which means they are works in progress.

Bohemia Interactive issued an interesting release today revealing how it has handled piracy over the years. The company claims that it uses a unique brand of copy protection that manifest itself as a form of gameplay / quality degradation. Naturally when a game starts messing up - even a pirated one - people start to complain about bugs. From the release:

Parents with children suffering from amblyopia (referred to by some as "Lazy Eye") frequently have trouble with kids refusing to do vision correction exercises. Since these exercises are important to correcting this type of vision problem, parents need tools to make the activity more fun and engaging for youngsters. Correction of amblyopia typically involves some sort of repetitive coordinative exercise, such as navigating a maze on paper, drawing lines on paper, etc. The problem is that some kids find these activities to be tedious and unchallenging.

The six crew members of the $15 million Mars500 experiment each paid 3 million roubles ($98,300) to participate in a 17-month long test to see if people stay healthy and sane on a trip to the red planet. The all-male crew of a 520-day mock mission to Mars had to find ways to ease tensions. After all, if you are on a trip to Mars it's probably not a good idea to pick a real fight with your comrade, who is more than likely a specialist in some field you are going to need. According to a Reuters report the crew turned to video games to ease their tension during the 17-month sim.

While we often take publishers and developers to task for the things they do that are generally anti-consumer, it's always nice to write stories about the good things they do for fans. Gearbox is a company that does go out of its way to treat its gamer base with dignity, respect and fondness.

A Gaikai-powered FIFA 12 demo is now available on YouTube, showing what the service is capable of doing by combining existing technology with streaming, cloud-based technology. Only available in the US for now, the news about the demo’s release was tweeted by Gaikai CEO David Perry earlier today.

In these trying financial times it's nice to see a developer care about the little guy. Spiderweb Software is one of those development studios. The one-man operation run by the outspoken Jeff Vogel has cut prices across the board for its entire catalog of role-playing games for Mac, iPad, and Windows by 20 percent. In addition, for the month of October Spiderweb has slashed an additional 10 percent off of all of its games.

Online gambling for real money is illegal, but a loophole manipulated to great effect by a new company called Playhem makes it perfectly legal. The trick being manipulated by the New York-based start-up is that it allows its users to place wagers on themselves as they compete against each other for cash or prizes.

If it wasn't for a certain 14-year-old girl, women would not be able to create a female persona in NHL 12. Lexi Peterson from Buffalo, NY enjoyed playing the EA Sports NHL games over the years with her brother but could never create an in-game character like her sibling could because there was no representation for women in the game. Most of the time she simply settled for making a male character with long hair. But prior to the launch of NHL 12 Lexi decided to try and do something about it.

This week the White House will launch what it calls the "Digital Promise Initiative," a gathering to promote breakthroughs in education and learning technologies. The event revolves around the national center created by Congress to advance breakthrough technologies that will improve America's education system will be launched on Friday, September 16, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at 10 a.m.