Wired Wednesday is on auto-pilot this week. As I’m moving tomorrow, and even this post is written from the floor, using stolen wireless, eating a sad little muffin. So I give you a link medley week. Some newfangled things, and a bunch of classics. Hold onto your mice.

GAMES
* A teaser for a game I’ve been looking forward to forever (okay, since last summer) — Mirror’s Edge. Featuring a strong, smart, athletic, neither over nor undersexed female lead. Le drool.

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I’m taking a break from videogames this week (though, like the weeds in Animal Crossing, they’ll be back). Turning instead to something ‘wired’ but entirely different…

With all of the noise about Ontario becoming a have-not province, and the apparent collapse of the Canadian auto manufacturing sector, it would be nice if there was some sort of significant innovation in this major market, with international appeal, with which Canada could become a global leader.

Oh wait. There is. A made in Canada electric car perfectly poised to step in as the standard in next wave urban driving.

Nah, let’s make more SUVs.

The best synopsis of this ZENN car (Zero Emission No Noise) is found here, courtesy of the Rick Mercer Report.

More on ZENN, and driving, after the jump.(more inside…)

Or “you can’t get ye flask”.

I’m in the middle of moving, so while I box my worldly possessions, I’m putting up some excerpts from Randy Smith’s column in the May 2008 issue of Edge Magazine.

It’s an excellent article, and if it wasn’t a bit too long (and a bit too legally dodgey) I’d post it here wholesale. It’s a then-and-now analysis on the dominant paradigms of video game design (and, y’know, life).

Randy makes his comparisons to Ultima V, but I kept thinking of hours spent playing King’s Quest, and its unguided, open-ended world mantra of “take anything that isn’t nailed down”. (As well as the many unforeseeable consequences. Oh god the consequences… “People who play King’s Quest should expect their characters to die rather frequently”).

It’s just one example of some damn interesting conversations happening around what’s going on in videogames, who’s playing them, and where they’re going. And that’s not even counting the conversations happening in my house.

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From Randy Smith’s “The Tyranny of Fun, and of Lord Blackthorn”, Edge Magazine, May 2008.

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“Am I the only one who gets really worked up about the fact that choice and consequence are out of vogue?
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Ultima V had a 50-page manual that didn’t teach you how to play the game. It afforded crucial tips like “Britannia has undergone a great transformation from totalitarian monarchy to representative democracy,” and “the newly risen moon, Trammel, is in its Gibbous Waxing phase,” and “slimes carry no booty”. But, after playing through the introduction, there you were holding a dagger and a cloth map with a teeming, jester-infested world sprawled out unhelpfully before you. Who would point you to glorious victory and amassment of booty? How would you make progress? Progress on what? The petty tyrant Lord Blackthorn, who hated freedom, advertised no vulnerabilities.
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Videogames are the dead horse that we flog over social dysfunction. Kid punched another kid? Videogames. Kid didn’t finish homework? Videogames.

Whether there’s a connection there or not, videogames are not one thing any more than “movies” or “books” are. Absolutely, there are abominably crap videogames. And for the same reasons I will never see a Saw movie, I will never play Manhunt.

I’m not an apologist for the industry — it’s immature and caters to the audience it thinks it has and knows. You can wade through a bog of junk looking for a quality game. Same as you can with movies. But quality titles are out there. And they’re in a lot of gamers’ collections.

The little list I’ve posted below represent just a few game options that are mainstream, and popular, and widely available. They’re what come to my mind when a poorly put-together article blames videogames (singular) for a kid… I don’t know, not showing their student pass when they get on a bus.

So here they are: Six Good Games (with no dodge-y settings)

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I love videogames. I’ll talk about why and what I enjoy in bits and pieces as we go along. But here’s the short version of what I don’t like:

Videogames, in North America at least, somehow got themselves treated as a special kind of media. Videogames, and people who play them, get referred to as a distinct subset in a way that doesn’t happen with other modes of entertainment. We don’t call people who like movies “filmers”. You might be a film-buff, but I think most people would see a film-buff as pretty categorically different than a “gamer”.

How that happened, I don’t really know (though I’m sure someone(s) somewhere are writing their Masters on it). But I think it sucks. Because the world of “gamers” ended up being kind of exclusive and kind of in a The-Simpsons-comic-book-guy way. And a lot of women ended up feeling like they were on the outside of that world.

We’ll get into some of the crapulent content and marketing and stores that make women feel like it’s a straight-boys-only club. But that’s not where I want to start talking about videogames. I want to start by showing them a little love.

And it’s a good week for videogame love.

If you live in Toronto, it’s possible you’ve noticed some odd protrusions on the side of a couple of downtown buildings. Protrusions that look like this:



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Hey team — inaugural Wired Wednesday post. w00t!

And I’m kicking it off with the hugely sexy topic of… hi-def optical disc formats!

No, come on, it’s gonna be good. I know, I should do all the shiny this week — when robots fall and Rock Band and Google 411 in Canada. And we’ll get there, I promise.

For this week though, we’re going practical. Because there’s nothing more Shameless than walking into a tech store and knowing your stuff.

I figured that if someone reasonably geeky, like myself, used to wonder WTF was the difference between Blu-ray and DVD and HD DVD, someone else was probably wondering too (though possibly with less profanity). And in the interests of spreading tech-savvyness amongst teh ladehs, I’ve written up below the cliffs notes to hi-def discs. What they are. What battle Blu-ray just “won”. And what to do with all your DVDs (<-keep them). Etc.

But first something from xkcd that has absolutely nothing to do with that:

Ahem, so, without further distractions: WTF is Blu-ray

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Make room in your daytimer, because we gots a new weekly feature!

Introducing Wired Wednesdays, our very own bi-weekly tech column to keep you up to date on all the gadgets, gizmos, whozits, whatzits and thingamabobs (No I did not just quote the Little Mermaid. That was your imagination.) you need to know about - though of course with a Shameless twist.

We are thrilled that Catherine has decided to take on the challenge, and plan to lavish her with comments full of teh’s and pwn’s. Please join in…and don’t forget to also pencil in Picks from Planet Venus and Film Fridays.