The park orienteering course at the end reminds me of a similar development in game design: Even before most people had GPS phones in real life, many video games already had a form of virtual GPS: A map with a marker of where the player is in the virtual world.

Only much later did various games start to abandon that marker (possibly even a map in general), because it made navigation too easy: it disincentivized exploration, orientation, things like figuring out vague verbal directions, and path finding in general.