I have often been described as oblivious (I prefer "focused") and I have yet to encounter someone with a worse sense of direction/orientation than mine. I could tell endless funny stories about how bad it is.

OP mentions a study involving navigating within a game, and I have the same problem in games. I simply cannot learn my way around a "map", as far back as Doom and still today. I can eventually learn specific routes, and eventually enough of these that I can perform reasonably well, but I don't form a mental model of the map even if I've played it hundreds of times and even if it's relatively small.

But I can follow directions, and I did passably well at military "land navigation" using a map, a compass and a protractor.

I would love to better understand why this is. My best guess currently is that "oblivious" is quite important - I've tried, many times, to start noticing landmarks so that I could use them later to get to a place without GPS or directions, but I always find myself having missed everything, or having "forgotten to notice" anything. My mind wanders, I guess.