Day: February 8, 2008

Depths of Peril – An Action RPG With a Twist

In many ways, Depths of Perils is a standard sort of action RPG along the lines of Diablo. Create a character, get some quests from the folks in town, go kill things, gather things, escort things, etc.

But this indie game adds an interesting strategic element. Your character is part of a guild (called a convenant here) and you can recruit NPCs to your guild. The goal in the game is to win over the hearts and minds of the townsfolk by finishing the quests, but your guild has competition in the form of computer-controlled guilds who are also accepting and completing quests to try to win over the town folks.

When you’re questing it’s a bit like an MMO in that there are NPCs with these other guilds out gathering 10 hides or killing 15 monsters in the forest at the same time you are questing. Moreover, there are too many quests for any one guild to complete, so you have to pick and choose what you’re going to do.

So you can’t just sit back and plod through this…you’ve got to not only quest, but you’ve got to beat the other computer players at question…or reach diplomatic agreements with them…or fight them.

Wow, someone actually came up with a computer game that has a new and interesting component beyond some new buzzword-compliant graphics engine. Amazing.

There’s a free downloadable demo on the Depths of Peril website, and registering the game costs$30.

Economic Studies of Pirates and Privateers

A couple of PDFs of economic studies of pirates and privateers:

Peter Leeson’s An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization (PDF) “investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates.”

Alexander Tabarrok’s The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Privateers (PDF) looks at the system of privateers — where commercial ships would be given license by states to attack enemy ships — and analyzes why it rose and then declined only to rise again in the last few decades with the widespread use of private military firms such as Blackwater and Global Risk International.