Myst: The Miller Brothers' Virtual Tale

In the third grade, we loved The Hobbit so much we wanted to live in it. And after school, screwing around in the arroyos that sliced through our SoCal neighborhood, we did, projecting Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains onto a landscape of sandstone cliffs and chaparral. Today's technoculture mavens -- Las Vegas hotel architects, interactive game designers, virtual reality gearheads -- want to engineer a similar sense of immersion: the peculiar feeling that you have passed from this world into...