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This week the kids at Camp Combe YMCA will have the chance to explore the great outdoors in the beautiful wooded hills of upstate New York. Or at least they will, if they have any time left after spending a week and a half inside the world of Minecraft.

Camp Combe is a sleep-away facility that serves over 500 kids a day during the summer months with traditional activities such as swimming, archery, high ropes courses and nature walks. Just an hour outside New York, NY a group of third through fifth graders have begun the camp’s first ever MinecraftEdu session.

"We have enormously long wait lists," says Camp Combe YMCA’s executive director Thad Gifford-Smith. "There’s probably 30 kids on the wait list per session."

It’s a phenomenon that TeacherGaming, the makers of the educational version of Minecraft, say is spreading all throughout North America. TeacherGaming tells Polygon it is aware of at least 50 organizations around the country offering similar camps at over 100 facilities.

ChicagoQuest: Teaching with games in Chicago's Cabrini Green

Gifford-Smith says that at first he was skeptical of the idea. To learn more about the game and evaluate its potential in an educational setting he spent some time with his own son.

"I looked over his shoulder a few times and thought to myself, this really is a creative piece of software," Gifford-Smith said. "It’s different. It’s not World of Warcraft and it’s not Mortal Kombat."

Gifford-Smith says that attendance is being driven mostly by children who are looking for something unusual in a sleep-away camp, and that their parents are supporting their decisions with an unexpected zeal.

"When we first brought up this idea we thought we were going to have to spend a lot of time educating parents," Gifford-Smith says. "We’ve had to do very little of that. They either realized that Minecraft was the lesser of several evils, or they had already recognized that Minecraft was a different kind of game."

"Games act sort of as a medium to get kids’ attention," says Santeri Kovisto, CEO of TeacherGaming. "Older organizations like the YMCA struggle to find ways to get kids excited about learning. They have a mission. It can be a mission from 30 years ago to make good citizens. It’s still a valid thing to do, but the effective tools are very different today."

Camp Combe’s MinecraftEdu has a STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] theme and maintains the goal of getting students interested in STEM fields. To do that students are first taught the basics of the Minecraft experience — how to log into the server, how to navigate using a keyboard and mouse and what is acceptable behavior in-game. Then they are given an objective, like building a bridge or creating a shelter in the wilderness. Instructors then link those objectives back to real world skills like teamwork and the scientific method.

On the first day they could be protecting their fellow campers from waves of zombies. A week and a half later they’ll be working together to build a particle accelerator.

To The Mun And Back: Kerbal Space Program

The biggest accomplishment, says Gifford-Smith, is teaching kids what he calls "digital discipline."

"Every parent who’s got a kid who’s addicted to some kind of video game knows what it’s like to try and get their attention," he says. "We wanted to be able to help kids to develop the skills to move fluidly from a virtual environment to the real world without irritating the people around them."

The only challenging part, Gifford-Smith says, has been staffing his camp.

"It’s hard to find an adult that’s really good at MinecraftEdu who is also good at working with kids," he says. "We bring in a couple of middle-schoolers who are really good at Minecraft and they act as junior teachers. They get community service, they feel good about helping out and they learn some good techniques for working with kids. They know the program far better than we do because they spend hours on it."

Of the 50 camps running in North America, TeacherGaming CEO Kovisto says that close to 10 of them are using KerbalEdu, the educational variant of Kerbal Space Program. He believes that the spaceflight simulation is the next step in educational gaming and expects it to be more and more common in summer camps as well as schools around the US.

"Educators don’t come to [TeacherGaming] looking for Kerbal. They come looking for Minecraft," Kovisto says. "Minecraft sort of sells itself. We are the ones pitching the idea of using Kerbal as well. When it comes to a lot of these science and technology and STEM initiatives when we show them Kerbal then they sort of get it. They tell us that it is something they have been looking for for quite some time."

Kovisto even thinks that the competitive nature of games can help drive more kids towards math and science, and in turn toward programs like Camp Combe YMCA.

Pre-orders and shipments of the latest Oculus Rift development kit have been suspended in China due to "extreme reseller purchases" that Oculus fears are preventing legitimate developers for obtaining stock, according to a post on Reddit from customer service lead Kevin Crawford.

China was removed from the Dev Kit 2 pre-order page and interested buyers have taken to the Reddit forums to complain their existing pre-orders for the hardware have been canceled. Crawford explained that this was done to prevent resellers from buying up large quantities of dev kits and then flipping them for a profit. This is not an uncommon occurrence, where second-hand hardware sellers will try to make a profit from reselling merchandise on sites like Taobao.

"Yes, it is a bummer that we've had to suspend sales in China due to extreme reseller purchases," Crawford wrote on Reddit. "We need to make sure that we are doing what we can to make sure that resellers that are looking to flip our product for a profit are not taking stock away from legitimate developer purchases globally.

"Our product, in its current form, is a developer kit, meant for developers that develop VR content. We are looking into alternative ways to make sure that our development kits are getting into legitimate developer hands in China."

The new version of the Oculus Rift dev kits will begin shipping this month for those who pre-ordered. The kit went on sale in March for $350.

StudioMDHR's 1930s cartoon-inspired run-and-gun indie title Cuphead will, in its ultimate form, be a trilogy, the game's creators told Kill Screen Daily.

Cuphead, which was shown during the indie game-focused segment of Microsoft's E3 press conference, is about 40 percent completed right now, according to developers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. The pair, who have been working on the game since 2010 out of their respective homes in Toronto and Saskatchewan, are designing the mechanics after building the art — hence the slow going. The Moldenhauers ultimately plan Cuphead as a trilogy, with expansion packs building on the game's weapons and elements.

The title uses classic run-and-gun mechanics, but instead of running and shooting to the right, the levels are designed around a series of boss battles. Bosses can be engaged in combat from a world map that will be reminiscent of old school top-down action RPGs, such as the early The Legend of Zelda games, according to Kill Screen.

Cuphead is slated to launch in 2015 for Xbox One and via Steam for PC.

As of this week, no more advertisements incorporating "sexually explicit content" will be promoted by Google's advertising network.

Google's AdWords platform is used to place advertisements on Google-owned sites; other sites can also choose to host AdWord ads on their own sites. The platform is thought to be responsible for the majority of Google's revenue, but although Google has placed restrictions on adult content for a while, the latest changes could potentially have chased some advertisers elsewhere.

According to CNBC, Google sent a message to advertisers at the beginning of June in order to notify them that it will no longer accept ads "that promote graphic depictions of sexual acts." It went on to say that this included content such as hardcore pornography and the depiction of masturbation and genital, anal, and oral sexual acts.

Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight digs deep into classic game conventions, making the game a love letter to old-school NES titles. But what the game likely didn't borrow from its predecessors is it most hilarious Easter egg: Butt Mode.

Butt Mode replaces many of the game's common nouns with the word "butt." Shovel Knight becomes "Butt Butt." "Fate" becomes "Butt." Shield Knight is "Shield Butt." And so on.

To activate Butt Mode, players can enter "WSWWAEAW" or "X&BUTT" when naming their save file. This will allow for endless hours of hilarity, but be warned that Feats — Shovel Knight's achievement system — will not be available to player while a cheat code is activated.

Shovel Knight was funded through Kickstarter last April; The game exceeded its funding goal of $75,000 and pulled in $311,502 from close to 15,000 backers. The game is available now for Nintendo Wii U, 3DS and Windows PC — for more details, check out our review.

Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen was suspended from his work after texts such as this one surfaced as part of a filed complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Tinder, the iOS App Store's fastest-growing dating app, set itself apart from the online dating competition in early 2013 by combining the personality-algorithm matching of OKCupid with GPS functionality, allowing users to comb through eligible, interested singles faster than ever before.

Yesterday, the app gained a different sort of attention after former Tinder executive Whitney Wolfe filed a wide-ranging sexual harassment claim against the company. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, included copies of enough scathing text exchanges sent to Wolfe by co-founder/CMO Justin Mateen to prompt the company to announce Mateen's temporary suspension "pending an ongoing internal investigation."

In addition to allegations of frequent, public, and sexist name-calling, the 19-page complaint alleged that Mateen "told Ms. Wolfe that he was taking away her 'co-founder' title because having a young female co-founder 'makes the company seem like a joke' and 'devalues' the company." Additionally, the complaint alleges a complete failure by both Tinder CEO Sean Rad and parent company Match.com CEO Sam Yagan to react to accusations of corporate impropriety; in the case of the latter, Yagan was alleged to have reacted to her complaints by saying, "I can still sleep at night."