After a while, however, the repetitive chitchat (or threats) of a passing stranger forces you to bump up against the truth: This is just a game. It's still fun--I had a whale of a time, honestly, looting stagecoaches, fighting in bar brawls, and stalking deer through rainy woods--but the illusion starts to weaken when you poke at it. Video games are carefully crafted objects, part of a multibillion-dollar industry, that are designed to be consumed. You play them, you loot a few stagecoaches, you finish, you move on. It may not always be like that.

The media circus around driverless cars and their safety and ease of use could be distracting us from a more realistic technology -- driverless buses. These are already running in several locations. In California, a bus made by French company EasyMile is due to come into public service in the next year. There have already been several demonstration runs in Canada. At London Heathrow, four-person driverless pods have been shuttling passengers between Terminal 5 and a car park since 2011, which in driverless technology terms is practically the Jurassic age.