Games for Change has announced that the game concept Safe Sex with Friends is the winner of the 2013 SEXETC.ORG Game Design Competition. The three finalists were Safe Sex with Friends, SexEd Super Task Force, and Check/Mate. After hearing presentations from all three finalists (during the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival) and thoughtful deliberation by jurors (Matt Parker, Lana Dakan, Lucinda Holt, and Naomi Clark,) Safe Sex with Friends was selected as the winning game.

Filmmaker Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, who is best known for her documentary ("Wonder Women! The Untold Stories of American Superheroines") about strong women throughout history and championing  the empowerment of women, has made a new game called Wonder City.

Organizers of the 10th annual Games for Change Festival sent along a reminder that next week the annual event dedicated to games will officially launch. This year the Games For Change Festival will take place at New World Stages in NYC from June 17-19.

NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon will host its fourth annual video game week June 17 -21 (12:35am ET on NBC). The weeklong event will likely feature a lot of the games being shown at E3 this week, along with Fallon's signature comedy sketches and special music guests and performances.

Musical guests to appear during the week also have ties to the video gaming world: on Monday Anamanaguchi will be taking the stage for their first live in-studio performance on American TV. The band is well-known for being at the forefront of the chiptune scene.

With the tagline "knock out animal abuse," People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) new 8-bit style beat 'em up lets you take on "animal experimenters" using real MMA fighter Aaron Simpson and Georgi Karakhanyan, with Octagon Girl Arianny Celeste. Cage Fight: Knock Out Animal Abuse lets players beat up waves of "scummy animal experimenters and free animals from painful laboratory tests."

Jeremy Snead, creative director at Mediajuice announced that Sean Astin will appear in Video Games: The Movie!, the documentary film about video games crowd funded by a very successful Kickstarter campaign. Astin, who considers himself a hardcore gamer, is best known for his roles in Goonies and The Lord of the Rings films (and who reprised his role as Samwise for The Lord of the Rings: War in the North videogame).

Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka is headed to the White House for a year. Pahlka founded Code for America in 2009 as a way of pairing technology and software companies with cities that are struggling to bring services into the information age. Pahlka will serve as the White House’s latest deputy chief technology officer for government innovation, according to a post on the organization’s blog.

London's Victoria & Albert Museum has hit a milestone of sorts this week. It has appointed it's very first Game Designer in Residence - Sophia George of Swallowtail Games. The BAFTA Award-winning game designer will work closely with the V&A museum and the University of Abertay Dundee to emphasize the history of British game design. She will release a game related to the residency by the summer of 2014. Game Designer in Residence is also supported by The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE).

Update #2: The video is back up!

Update: the video has been removed temporarily by YouTube. Visiting the link provides the following message:

"This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube's Terms of Service. "

We'll have more on this as information becomes available, but clearly someone related to one of the many games highlighted in the video has made a copyright claim.

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).

According to a survey of male customers conducted by UK video game retailer GAME (and reported on by the Daily Record), approximately 39 percent of British men said they would rather play games than do anything on a bank holiday (a public holiday in the UK).

The National Endowment for the Arts let us know that it will host a webinar on Thursday, May 30 ( 3:00-4:00 p.m. EDT) to help applicants understand the application process for securing a media arts projects grant. The NEA's Media Arts Director Alyce Myatt will conduct the webinar, which will offer an overview of guidelines, information on selecting work samples, and advice on preparing a strong application. All of this will be followed by a brief question and answer session.

The iam8bit Entertainment System, a videogame-themed art exhibit, is set to launch in Los Angeles on June 7. Organizers of the iam8bit Entertainment System promise the debut of an international showcase featuring the work of a variety of returning and first-time artists, all inspired by classic 1980s videogames.

An interesting editorial penned by Barbara Jones, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association, puts the brakes on all the talk about banning video games from public libraries.

Australia's Bureau of Statistics has released an interesting game for iOS devices that uses real census data (circa 2011) from the country's various towns called Run That Town. Players build a town using real census data (which can include the real town they live in… in Australia) and run it.

First Lady Michelle Obama recently gave a commencement address at Bowie State University encouraging more young African Americans to continue their education. She does so by throwing culture like videogames, television, and music under the bus.

Nintendo has decided to target "Let's Play" videos on YouTube with "content ID match" claims, according to multiple reports this morning. By making these claims it allows Nintendo to either block content or monetize the video. This is not sitting well with Let's Play video makers like Zack Scott whose videos have been targeted by Nintendo.

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.

GTFO, a documentary about sexism and harassment in the video games industry and within the gaming community has surpassed its funding goal of $20,000. With four more days to go, the documentary has managed to raise $23,829 from just 882 backers on Kickstarter. The documentary is being put together by New York-based filmmaker Shannon Sun-Higginson, who describes herself as a casual gamer.

Papo & Yo developer Minority Media took the wraps off the next project it is working on - a game about bullying. The game is called the Silent Enemy, and explores the topic of bullying and what people who see bulling tend to do (not get involved). According to a promo video for the game, it will feature an "Aboriginal character" who embarks on a quest to find springtime in Northern Quebec. During that quest the protagonist will be bullied by crow-like creatures that hinders his quest.

Accessibility advisor AccessAble Games is looking to raise $40,000 via Start Some Good for a Spanish and English language game called My Carnival that helps children with cystic fibrosis maximize their pulmonary functions.

We've seen the pay-what-you want bundle dedicated to indie games from places like the Humble Bundle and Indie Royale Bundle, but Story Bundle is offering a great collection of books for whatever you are willing to pay - and all of them are related in some way to gaming.

Last week we asked you if you "have you ever stopped playing a video game on moral grounds?" The question was inspired by this story about a man who got a refund from Valve because he objected to a certain scene in the Steam version of BioShock Infinite involving a religious rite.

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.

Book publisher Seven Stories Press announced today that it will publish the English language version of the book about independent game Minecraft and its creator Markus 'Notch' Persson at the end of this year. The book is called "Minecraft; The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything, and was written by Swedish journalists Linus Larsson and Daniel Goldberg, with the English translation being handled by Jennifer Hawkins.

Dead Shark Triplepunch has been named the winning team at Make Something Unreal Live 2013, Epic Games announced. The team has won a variety of hardware prizes in addition to the main award of a commercial Unreal Engine 4 license. The team from Belkinge Institute of Technology in Sweden won with their game Epigenesis, which was developed with Epic’s Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free version of the Unreal Engine 3.

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.

The U.S. Department of State and marketing agency The SuperGroup have released a game that they hope will teach 12 - 16 year olds American culture and better English. The goal is to make learning about language fun. The browser-based game, which is available now online and on mobile phones, comes with support materials for teachers and was tested in non-English speaking countries like Peru, Columbia, and Indonesia.

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.