Well, the site (kickstarter.com) probably explains it better, but kickstarter is, as you intuited, for advanced funding of creative projects. One outlines one's project, sets a financial goal of an amount of money one feels is necessary to accomplish that project, and a time limit. If you manage to raise your goal, from donations, by the time limit, then you get that money and you're obligated* to carry through on the project. If not, nobody pays anything and the project (or at least the funding thereof) just dies on the vine.
There are reward levels for different amounts of donation, kindof like a pledge drive on NPR: kick in 60 bucks and we'll send you a tote bag! The original intention is for these reward levels to be little kitschy thank-you gifts that either aren't worth the cost of the donation (since some part of the donation will be going toward the eventual project, not just giving you stuff) are intangible (like having your name written on a backers page in a book, or having a character named after you in an indie video game) or are only worth the money because of exclusivity/advance (if I'm kickstarting a novel and your donation gets you a copy two months ahead of time).
However, people very quickly realized that sometimes you can have the reward levels *be* the project, and at that point it becomes just a sort of ordering system for limited runs of products. Which is how White Wolf rolls: we're gonna print a really limited series of books, based on interest, and if you buy in you can get one of them, but there's no actual kickstart: the money doesn't go to launching a continuous print-run of the books, it only pays for the books that the backers themselves get (and any intangibles or kitschy gifts they may earn with bigger donations). It's kindof an awesome twisting of the system.
So yeah. That's kickstarter. Go look at projects. Enjoy losing your money to all sorts of awesomeness. (I think I've backed, like, 18 projects in the last year, and I'm finally starting to see finished products {Chuck Wendig has the honor delivering my first actual kickstarter reward in the form of his novel Bait Dog.})
*"Obligated". As far as I know, nobody's really yet addressed what happens if someone just takes the money and runs, or (less cynically) just isn't able to accomplish the project or get rewards out to the backers. I'm kindof eager/dreading to see how that shit gets handled when it eventually has to get handled. And it will eventually have to get handled.