Welcome to the site! Ludus Novus is a podcast and blog discussing the art of interactivity; specifically, interactive fiction, digital games, and roleplaying. I intend for it to be a way to discuss the artistic and literary issues and potential surrounding these kind of games, and try to figure out how to take them beyond just trivial entertainment.

I’m going to do my best to be interesting and novel, and in order to do that, I’ve come up with a few guidelines for myself:

• The target length of any one podcast will be twenty minutes. I think that’s long enough to say something, and not too long that a listener will get bored or not have enough time to finish in one sitting.
• There will be one “segment” per podcast. I won’t bundle an interview and another discussion into one file. If I want to do them both, they’ll be two different podcasts. I might cover short news items in an introduction, but there will only be one big piece of content per podcast.
• I will edit my podcasts for errors.
• I will not beg for votes on podcast ranking sites.
• When I discuss digital games, I’ll do my best not to automatically classify them by genre. There’s too much of a tendency out there to want to categorize games as first-person-shooters or action-adventures or RPGs.

I’m sure that I’ll be refining and modifying these rules as I go along, but for now, I’ll sign off. The first episode of Ludus Novus will discuss cutscenes. If you have any comments or ideas about the show or the topic of cutscenes, please post them in the comments section of this entry.