Radar Reliance: The Cognitive Degradation of Virtual Spatial Navigation

In early video games, players navigated massive digital worlds using environmental landmarks, memory, and spatial awareness. Today, modern open-world games feature stunning, hyper-realistic environments, yet players rarely actually look at them. Instead, they spend hundreds of hours staring at a tiny, glowing circle in the corner of their screen: the minimap. The introduction of GPS-style waypoi...