Games for Change announced the finalists for the Games for Change Awards, to be presented at the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival. The special 10th anniversary event will take place over three days from June 17-19th at New World Stages in New York City.

The Games for Change Festival is dedicated to bringing game creators and other individuals together to discuss and celebrate the positive social impact of games. Over the years, the festival has played host to speakers ranging from VP Al Gore to retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Peter Thiel Foundation (founded by the former CEO and co-founder of PayPal) announced the third set of young entrepreneurs to be awarded 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships. These new "Thiel Fellows" will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of entrepreneurs over a two year period.

German game developer and publisher InnoGames announced that its online browser-based strategy game, Forge of Empires, has been named the "Best Browsergame" by the "Deutscher Computerspielepreis" (or German Computer Game Award) and has won a 50,000 Euros prize. While that is exciting news for the developer, the company also revealed that it will divide the prize money up amongst its employees. Forge of Empires beat out Skylancer: Battle for Horizon (Chimera Entertainment) and The Great Jitters - Haunted Hunt (kunst-stoff) to win.

It looks like Electronic Arts has delivered a lethal blow to Bank of America in the grand finale of the Consumerist's 2013 Worst Company in America tournament. EA slaughtered Ticketmaster earlier in the week to get to the finals. It garnered 78.89 percent of the vote, compared to Ticketmaster's 21.11 percent in that battle.

EA COO Peter Moore may have wanted to defend his company in the wake of possibly winning The Consumerist Worst Company of 2013 award, but his defense of the company's practices and his contention that conservative groups are doing most of the voting does not sit well with the site.

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 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.

Electronic Arts has earned the dubious distinction of being named a contender again this year (it won last year) for the annual Consumerist award, the 2013 Worst Company in America award. EA will have some stiff competition this year including Bank of America, AT&T, Ticketmaster, Comcast, PayPal, and Sallie Mae - amongst many others. Some notable inclusions for this year include Carnival Cruise (for its “Poop Cruise”), JC Penney, and Anheuser-Busch.

Game Connection America and [a]list daily today revealed nominees for the Best in Video Game Marketing Award, to be handed out at Game Connection America 2013 and Riot Games, Telltale Games, and Microsoft lead the pack with nominations. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on March 25, 2013, held from 4:30 to 5:30 pm at San Francisco’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

Media Molecule co-founder and studio director Siobhan Reddy has been named Australian Woman of the Year in the U.K. for 2013. The award is sponsored by Qantas Airways and the networking organization Australian Business.

Reddy was born in Sydney but migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1990s. She is in charge of the Guildford, U.K.-based studio that developed the LittleBigPlanet series and is hard at work on its latest IP called Tearaway. She was honored with the award last night in London.

Jake Solomon and the team at Firaxis Games have put together a video asking the community to watch them at this year's Game Developers Choice Awards at the Game Developers Conference in late March. From there the video kind of goes off the rails.

Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell will be honored by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) with the Academy Fellowship at this year's British Academy Games Awards. He'll be honored with this prestigious award at a ceremony taking place on March 5 at the London Hilton, Park Lane.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) announced today the nominees for their British Academy Games Awards 2013 to be handed out on March 5. A total of 53 games have been nominated for awards across 17 categories covering the last 12 months of releases in the UK.

BioWare's founding fathers - Doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk - will be honored at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco as part of the Game Developers Choice Awards. The founders of the studio that have brought us such hits as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Knights, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age will be honored with lifetime achievement awards for their "contributions to the art and science of games."

Journey was the big winner at this year's 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, bringing home eight awards in various categories including Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design, Casual Game of the Year, Outstanding Innovation in Gaming, Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction, Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, and Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay.

The National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAVGTR) today revealed the nominees for the 12th Annual 2012 NAVGTR Award nominations. Since 2001, a panel of over 600 trade voters have chosen the best games in over 50 categories, recognizing interactive entertainment industry achievements in the fields of art, technology, and production.

Thatgamecompany's popular PS3 title Journey has been nominated for 11 Dice Summit Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) announced today. Nerdist founder Chris Hardwick will host the video game award show at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas on Feb. 7, while Machinima will live stream the awards show. A total of 63 games were nominated for various awards across various platforms including console, mobile, web, portable and PC platforms received nominations this year.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries have announced the Main Competition finalists for the 15th annual awards - nominating nearly 30 independent game titles from around the world. This year's finalists were picked by expert juries, following "playthroughs and recommendations" of 580+ IGF entries from over 200 top independent game experts, according to organizers.

The AbleGamers Foundation have given EA Sports' international soccer game FIFA 13 the AbleGamers Mainstream Accessible Game of the Year Award. The charity dedicated to advancing accessibility for gamers with disabilities chose FIFA 13 because of its wealth of accessibility options that made it easy for gamers with various physical limitations to configure the game to high levels of comfort and ease of use.

If you didn't catch the Spike TV VGA's on Friday then you probably didn't notice that Telltale Games' episodic The Walking Dead game won quite a few awards including Game of the Year, Best Adapted Video Game, Best Downloadable Game, and Best Performance By a Human Female - Melissa Hutchison as Clementine. Telltale also won the Studio of the Year Award.

Electronic Arts employee Wendell Harlow has been honored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation with a Queen's Diamond Jubilee Award. The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal marks the 60th anniversary of England's Queen Elizabeth II’s "accession to the Throne" and honors the achievements and contributions of Canadians. Wendell received the distinct honor for over a decade of supporting the Make-A-Wish Foundation in Canada.

Time Magazine has compiled its list of the "All-Time 100 Video Games." Compiled by Time staffers, the list is divided by decades going all the way back to the 1970s and ending in 2010. Nominations from the 1970s include such classics as The Oregon Trail, Pong, and Space Invaders. For the 1980s hits such as Super Mario Bros., Frogger, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda get a listing. The 1990s choices include Solitaire, Doom, and Goldeneye 007.

Spike TV has announced the nominees for the tenth annual Spike TV Video Game Awards. Borderlands 2, Halo 4 and Journey lead the pack, each earning seven nominations. The Spike TV VGAs will be hosted by Samuel L. Jackson and are scheduled to take place Friday, Dec. 7 at 9 p.m. ET. The annual awards are broken down into 30 different categories ranging from Game of the Year to Best Performance by a Human Male and Female.

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) announced this morning that Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell will be the 17th inductee into the AIAS Hall of Fame. He will also deliver the 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit as its Thursday conference keynote. The 2013 Hall of Fame Award will be presented to Gabe by Epic Games President Dr. Michael Capps, who serves on the AIAS board of directors and the AIAS awards committee.

The creative force behind the narrative in Batman: Arkham City has won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain videogame writing award for 2012. Paul Crocker also wrote the story for Rocksteady's Arkham Asylum. Crocker had some tough competition including Emma Beeby, who wrote the story for Risen 2: Dark Waters, and Zombies, Run! writer Naomi Alderman.

Crocker joins previous winners such as Overlord’s Rhianna Pratchett, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West writers Tameem Antoniades and Alex Garland and Red Dead Redemption writers Dan and Mike House.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the big winner of this year's Golden Joystick Awards, winning the ultimate game of the year award and top gaming moment award for its Throat of the World scene and best RPG. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim beat out the likes of Modern Warfare 3, Diablo 3 and Mass Effect 3 to earn the top prize.

The winners for the 2012 Game Developers Choice Online Awards have been announced with Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies designer Raph Koster being named "Online Game Legend."

Other big winners included Riot Games' League of Legends and BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic (which won multiple awards).

The full list of winners (thanks GII) can be found below:

CD Projekt RED's DRM-free role-playing game The Witcher 2 has swept the European Games Awards. The game won awards for Best European Art Direction, Best European Character Design, Best European Gameworld, Best European Game Design, Best European Game, and Best European Special Edition.

Battlefield 3 did pretty well too, scoring awards for Best European Action Game, Best European Multiplayer Game, Best European Console Game, and Best European Sound.

The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) has revealed the winners of its 2012 scholarship program. The trade group that represents retailers in the United States (and was the lead in Brown v. EMA) has awarded five students $1,500 a year for up to four years who are entering college as freshmen.

Nominees for the 2012 Game Developers Choice Online Awards have been announced, with Star Wars: The Old Republic picking up the most in six different categories. Other games picking up multiple nominations this year include League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Rage Of Bahamut, Empires & Allies, Realm of the Mad God, Rift, CastleVille, The Sims Social, and Draw Something.