OOP(in the hierarchical sense) is heavily blunted by the need for global mutable state in games. The game design often turns out to need to access anything, any

OOP(in the hierarchical sense) is heavily blunted by the need for global mutable state in games. The game design often turns out to need to access anything, anywhere, at any time, so the natural move is towards a model more reminiscent of a relational database, with lots of indexing and denormalization. Subsequently the job of implementing game design is reduced to a lot of query statements; most of them are collision or "is-a" categorizations. At the same time, there's some pressure to serialize large parts of the game, if possible, for two reasons - save games, and editing tools. This further encourages a more formal relational-type system(leading to the entity/component distinction), since a setup based around unstructured pointers is harder to cleanly serialize.