In a video game, you don't: get (actually) injured, get tired, get sweaty, get attacked by mosquitos, walk through poison ivy or have a nasty encounter with a t

In a video game, you don't: get (actually) injured, get tired, get sweaty, get attacked by mosquitos, walk through poison ivy or have a nasty encounter with a thorn bush that leaves you hurting and/or itching for days, get sunburnt, spend 30+ minutes just commuting to the interesting thing/area only to realize you forgot something important and will now have a miserable time unless you want to burn an hour-plus round-trip going back for it, have to lose fifteen minutes finding some place that'll let your kid use the bathroom before they piss themselves and ruin the rest of the day (mainly a core-of-major-cities problem, sure, but those are also top-tier fun-having destinations), discover that the website lied and actually the thing you're here for is closed today, break expensive equipment if you make a mistake or are unlucky, soak your shoes and socks and have to take out significant time to solve that (very boring) problem or else just suffer the rest of the day, et c. Game worlds are also usually far more compact and smaller than the real world, even the "big" ones. If it took a couple real-world days to walk to the top of the Throat of the World in Skyrim, while you're combo sweating-freezing in heavy clothes, legs are dead by halfway up, and most of the time nothing's happening and also much of the time you're in clouds obscuring the best views... it'd be a lot less fun. Instead, in the actual game, you can run the "7,000 steps" in what, 15 minutes if you ignore enemies? It's telling that most of these games have rather high movement speed, and often also some form of teleportation, despite also having the advantages of being tailor-designed to be beautiful and fun and much smaller than real-world equivalents. Skyrim experienced at a realistic walking/hiking pace and without any form of time-skip fast travel would be a lot less fun. Ditto the recent Zelda games. Link basically runs everywhere, even when you're not "sprinting", and can perform incredible and quick feats of climbing to get over or on top of obstacles. Plus the whole paraglider thing. You climb a tall cliff in real life, now you gotta climb back down....