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.

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.

Indie Game: The Movie had a decent showing at the Sundance Film Festival, and now the documentary about the life and craft of several prominent indie game developers is heading to South by South West (SXSW) as a "Festival Favorite."

In case you don't know much about it, Indie Game: The Movie is the creation of first-time filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky who follow indie game developers Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (FEZ), and Jonathan Blow (Braid) at key moments in the game development process.

While some politicians in Poland believe that signing the ACTA treaty was a smart idea - even in the midst of actual protesting in the streets (some put the number of protesters at 20,000 people), some have sided with the public. The picture to your left - found on TechDirt - shows that some politicians in the country have some sense. Today a whole gaggle of politicians donned famed Guy Fawkes masks in the Parliament to protest the vote.

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.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Mojang co-founder and Minecraft developer Markus "Notch" Persson said that his company no longer feels like an "indie studio."

Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation wrote a rather lengthy thank-you note to those in the Internet community that got involved in the blackout of the popular online site. While we can't list every one, we did note her thanks to GamePolitics contributor Dan Rosenthal, and the 1,800 English Wikipedia users who convinced the site to go dark.

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: 

2D Boy's iOS version of World of Goo has hit a major milestone - more than 1 million downloads in just over 13 months. Developer 2D Boy says that sales have been steady on both iOS and Android devices, with numbers being pushed even higher thanks to the HD Universal edition available for the iPad.

According to a tweet from Team Meat, Super Meat Boy has managed to sell one million copies since its release in October. The gory-but-cute platformer was developed by Team Meat (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes) and was released in October 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade as part of Microsoft's GameFeast promotion. The game was later released on Valve's Steam digital distribution platform. The game garnered critical praise from the media and was embraced by fans.

Magazine publisher Computec Media announced details on the second round of its international game developer contest, Make the Game 2012. Indie developers interested in registering for the international browser and social games competition have until April 16 to do so. This year Computec Media plans to invest 1 million Euros in the contest to find the best new browser and social network games. Entries will be judged by a five-member jury of "experts," who will ultimately award prizes to up to three promising games.

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.

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.

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.

Customers who pay more than the average price for the Humble Introversion Bundle will get Dungeons of Dredmor for free. The pay-what-you-want bundle that lets consumers divide the money up between the game's developer, Child's Play, or Electronic Frontier Foundation can get Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON, Multiwinia, and two bonus prototype games - the Voxel Tech Demo and the Subversion City Demo. These last two are prototypes, or works in progress. If you pay more than the average price currently being offered, you can also get Crayon Physics Deluxe and Aquaria.

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.

Indie world building game Minecraft has around 17,000,000 registered users, and 1000 logins per hour, according to figures obtained by GameFront. The numbers were revealed by developer Mojang during the MineCon fan event in Las Vegas over the weekend.

Mojang also revealed that Minecraft sees 241,920,000 logins per month, and was seeing 4000 logins per second after the launch of version 1.0. So far the launcher has downloaded two billion files as well. They also said that 11,000 skins are downloaded in-game per second.

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.

Comcast and CenturyLink have failed to create a repeat of their 2009 victory in the city of Longmont, Colorado. The city wanted to use its own broadband infrastructure instead of relying on ISP's like Comcast and CenturyLink, but state law required that a referendum be passed by the town's citizens in order to use it. In 2009 broadband providers Comcast and CenturyLink spent an obscene amount of money to convince residents of the town that it was a bad idea. The plan worked and citizens rejected it by 56 percent of the vote.

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.

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.

Two iPhone games produced in 12 working days during UK event Gamer Camp: Nano are now available on the Apple App Store. The games were built during a month-long game developer training course at Birmingham City University. The game are free to download. The two games, They Came From the Deep and Aliens vs. Humans, were created by thirteen trainee artists and programmers working together in teams. The one month course is a scaled down version of the full 12-month long Masters version of the course, Gamer Camp: Pro, which starts in September.

Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel, who is also known as the "Godfather of Videogame Journalism," passed away on September 4. The cause of his death was unknown at the time of this writing. Bill Kunkel, along with Arnie Katz, created the first major video game magazine to be sold on newsstands. The success of that first publication led to the creation of Electronic Games magazine.

Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson spent the weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle showing off new features in the latest Minecraft update (1.8) and the first official trailer for its upcoming game Scrolls. While there, he answered some questions about his pending lawsuit with Bethesda over the Scrolls game name. Bethesda alleges that the name "Scrolls" infringes on their trademark for "The Elder Scrolls."

When asked if he had any back-up names for Scrolls in the event that he lost the legal fight with Bethesda, Persson joked: