It is done for AI research. The “real world scenarios” usually involve several powerful AIs, so depending on what you mean by “sci-fi” they might not apply. (Even if you don’t consider AIs sci-fi, the usual problem statements make lots of simplifying assumptions that are not necessarily realistic, like perfect guessing and things like that, but that’s just like ignoring friction in physics problems, nobody expects for the exact same thing to happen in practice.)