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I have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.
I wonder if it's actually anything to do with mentally mapping digital areas per se, or if it's more to do with the fact that you're not engaging your senses in the same way as when you're moving around a physical space.

If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair.

Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill.

Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.

I think this is definitely part of the problem. The senses are designed to all be involved in navigating a single, mostly-permanent world. Proprioception is supposed to orient within this permanent space. Whereas my proprioception has "nothing to do" in video games, and all my senses are only experiencing the world outside the game, which I am giving none of my attention.
> I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.

How do you know this is caused by gaming?

Subjectively, it gets much worse when I play a lot of of video games, and I am rapidly losing the ability to develop facility at new games. Of course this could just be said to be aging, or some other malady of the mind, but it feels distinctly related to the gaming in particular.