It'd be nice if 1.3 and 1.4 could be done with just 1 line of call, but you're missing the fact that pretty much any graphics and audio library will have some "

It'd be nice if 1.3 and 1.4 could be done with just 1 line of call, but you're missing the fact that pretty much any graphics and audio library will have some "context" singleton through which it is called due to the way these interact with the operating system. The APIs are deliberately designed this way to encapsulate the global state they use. Sure you can make a global variable for the context and avoid passing it around - but the refactoring route is the preferred option in the imperative world anyway. If you're writing in Haskell with any expectation of using IO for some exploratory programming like this, the obvious solution is to make your functions of type (:: MonadIO m => ... -> m ...), then any refactoring you need to do to add additional facets to your state can be specified elsewhere as part of a MonadIO transformer. Your calls to "play explosion.mp3" and "render explosion" just need a liftIO on them.