“Mark Tyburn dreams of building the perfect video game,” reads the sales blurb for Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser’s novel A Better Paradise: Volume One: An Aftermath, a title so resplendent with drive-by colons that you could easily guess this man spent thirty years working in videogames. “Kurt Fischer dreams of being a rich and successful executive. Daisy Tyburn dreams of having the ideal father. John Tyburn Smith dreams of fitting in. NigelDave just dreams of becoming human.”
PleaseDon’tLetThatBeATypo, I immediately prayed to every god I knew the name of, and a few I made up on the spot. Please let NigelDave be real.
NigelDave is real. He’s some sort of sentient AI, I think. And without really knowing anything about the setting, I actually quite like the idea of an AI picking two blokey first names in a sort of Ford Prefect, nicely inconspicuous way. He only wants to be loved, he says.
I love you, NigelDave.
A Better Paradise is Houser’s multimedia project, note Gamespot. Produced by his company Absurd Ventures, it’s got its own audiofiction series starring Human Traffic’s (and The Walking Dead’s) Andrew Lincoln. Absurd Ventures also announced last year they were making an “open world action-adventure” set in the same universe.
A few of the novel’s other characters also have voiced intro videos online. Here’s a quote from Daisy Tyburn who, may I remind you, “dreams of having the ideal father”. The statistically perfect dad. What’s the Bechdel test but for before the character has spoken?
“I watch the people, and the people are like robots and the robots are like people. People watch their screens and the screens watch people.”
Gods, it’s like reading Candide all over again. No one man should have access to such a dangerous combination of wit and prescience.
“Set in the near future, A Better Paradise tells the story of the ill-fated development of an ambitious but addictive video game project that goes very wrong,” continues the blurb. “As the software they developed starts to produce unexpected and disturbing results, the project is shut down and abandoned. Until now.”
The book is out this year, October 14th. Here’s a 13 minute analysis of Grand Theft Auto 6’s beer bottles to keep you going in the wait for that game’s release, currently slated for May 26th, 2026.
