Ask someone to recall the third item in a dropdown they used yesterday and you will get a blank look. Ask them where the bakery is in a town they visited once and they will point. Human memory is ferociously good at places and mediocre at lists — and interface design mostly ignores this.
That asymmetry is the argument for spatial browsing. The Holovate Land Exchange exists as a conventional filterable grid, because grids are efficient. But every card in that grid is also a physical parcel in a walkable world, and the two views stay synchronized: select a card and the world travels there; discover a parcel on foot and the grid reflects it.
Discovery mechanics change how inventory is experienced. A parcel you found by walking a ridge at the edge of the Estate district is not row 87 of a table — it is a place you can find again without searching, anchored to landmarks and the memory of getting there.
This is not an argument against menus. It is an argument that when your inventory is spatial by nature — land, venues, rooms, exhibits — offering only a list throws away the strongest indexing system your users own: their own spatial memory.
Compare both views at the Land Exchange.