Pushing Buttons: Why do I get so emotionally attached to inanimate objects in games?

I had to give up on Pacific Drive, the weird-fiction-inspired driving survival game I recommended the other week. Not because it's bad – it's great – but because it needed 20-plus hours from me that I just do not have right now. It's a game about probing further and further into a long-abandoned exclusion zone in a beat-up old car, and the anomalies you encounter. These range from pillars suddenly thrusting themselves from the earth to alarming hurricanes that shove you around the road, and all are excitingly inventive and creepy. But it was the tourists that finished me off.