You’re fine.
Having lower than recommended spec will not cause damage to a computer. It just might mean that the game performance is not quite as good as you would hope.
The recommended spec from developers is not hard and fast. It’s their best guess of what will result in an acceptable level of performance so that people who purchase the game have a reasonable experience.
Back in my poor student days I used to to play the original Alien Vs Predator on a way below spec Cyrex based system and it would run at 15fps. But it was the best I had so I made do.
Laptops will often run quite hot, and so it would be a good idea to ensure you have it set up so it can get air properly (on a hard table, not on a cloth, or you lap). But modern computers have plenty of fail safes now.
If your CPU gets too hot it will just slow down until the temperature comes under control (it used to just BSOD back in the day). And at the very worst it will do an emergency shutdown long before it causes any damage and then just give you a warning when it boots back up. But it should only be doing this if there is a physical issue such as the vents all being clogged up with dust or the thermal paste having decayed.
So game happy.
A virtual machine is just a logical computer that is distinct from the physical hardware. There are a few different ways you can run them. If you are using Windows, then you can enable Hyper-V (I believe you will need Pro, but this might have changed). You can also use third party tools like VirtualBox or VMWare.
They all work a little different, but in effect what they allow you to do is to install operating systems and run computers as if they were applications. Common uses for this include running test labs for ICT work, security sandboxes (which is what you’re referring to) and perhaps the most common running servers in industry.
I’m a developer. When I make some software we have to get it out there for people to use. And this means deploying it into a cloud like AWS, Azure, Firebase &c. To do this you’ll pop the software onto a virtual machine from where it will run. Sometimes you’ll use special VMs for this like the Azure App Services, and often you’ll use some more fancy VM technology like Docker and Kubernetes.
But the code idea is all the same. You’re creating a full computer with an operating system and its own software, but in a way that is abstracted from the underlying hardware.
Do be aware that VMs can be safe as sandboxes but you do need to set them up properly for this to be the case. It is quite possible to configure them so that they do have access to networks and the host OS, so running virus infected software on them can be dangerous if you’re not sure that you have properly configured them to be secure.