system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why can massive games like Skyrim fit on one disc while the first season of Heroes needs seven?

It just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm not approaching the question properly. The way I see it, 23 episodes of Heroes that never change, that you can't interact with, and that don't offer as much content as a game like Skyrim, should be able to fit on one disc.

Skyrim is an entire continent of places to explore, enemies to battle, and conversations to engage in. Then you have to consider all the choices the player makes, like which quest to do, and all the choices he hasn't made. It all has to exist somewhere, right? Also, I've seen people dedicate way more hours of time than your average season of television show, but it can all fit on one disc. How does that work? I feel like it's a 'bag of holding' type situation going on...

I apologize for using Heroes as a reference. It was the only thing I could think of at the time to quantify what I wanted to say. Apologies as well if this is a silly question.
gpt
Your TV show is (by necessity) stored as a series of images of each frame. Playing the show means showing those images one by one. You can save some space with compression, but this is still the basic idea. The TV shows take up a lot of space because that's an inherent property of all those big images - its a lot of pixels, and you need a lot of space to store that information bit by bit.

Games do *not* store data like this. As a very basic overview, they instead store two important components; the game engine, which manages the game logic, and the various art assets. Now, it turns out that the engine itself can be suitably small, so that doesn't cause a problem. As for the art bits, the game world is constructed of polygons and textures that are mapped on to them - that is, the same image mapped all over the place, with the mapping done in real time by the graphics card rather than pre-rendered. The game isn't storing all this in advance, the actual full images of the world are constantly being constructed/updated from the relatively small art information. With this method, and the fact that the texture and polygon details are both of a much lower resolution than real life, the information stored ends up being far less than those TV shows.

If you tried to do the game a different way, such as by prerendering everything as a detailed image without duplication, it would be uselessly large or incredibly low in detail.