"You did what to the controller system?!"
Space is boring. Really boring. You just wont believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly boring it is! I mean, you may think it's a bore to go down the street to the chemist's but that's just peanuts to space! Listen...
— Paraphrased from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas
Adams
So the ship's gamer and engineering nerd got really fed up one day and decided to soup up their virtual reality gaming rig a bit. Sure, the PlayBox Whee 9001 does come with some pretty sweet specs but it pales when compared to the hi-tech, government-funded VR controllers that are used to remote control all the robots and drones that perform the very dangerous tasks of inspecting and performing external maintenance on the ship.
So said gamer did a bit of tinkering, some sweet hacks, and some not-quite-as-sweet workarounds, and some more tweaking to make the plugs fit and then...
...burned out the whole unit.
Oh, sh... uhm... well... no problem, I can fix this! We have a spare unit. I will just pull out the old unit, plug in the spare, and we are good to g...
...what the...
...oh come ON!!
Who designs spacecraft with interfaces that can be put in backwards?!
So yes, they do have all those very fancy robots and drones to do all those dangerous tasks. But after some "clever" crew member managed to wreck the system that controls them, they are now very fancy paper weights (in a no-weight environment).
Sure, they can jury-rig the PlayBox's headset but it just is not enough to do the kind of inspections needed, unable to control the external 1000x macro lens sensors, or display complete views from the broad spectrum extreme-IR-to-gamma cameras, and other things that are required.
Add to the issues that the game console's controllers have to be held in your hand — making them extremely clunky compared to the full motion capture bodysuit of the original — and we arrive at the conclusion that it just is not viable to do it remotely any more.
And with no shop to get spare parts for another 4 light-years, this — boys and girls — is why we do not mess about with the equipment we have on board. smacks tinkerer over the back of the head