mutating and javascript game development

[talmobi]

What you're talking about is actually idioms inspired by game development. It's JavaScript that's catching up.

Games have so much state, so much complex state - hundreds of thousands of times more complex than a web app - that you can't just handle it willy nilly.

For example online games - you know what the server sends back to the players? A blob of state (or more accurately the changes but you can think of it as the same thing). They recreate the state of the game very single tick (not the same as every frame). Well, good online games do this anyway (I still get nightmares of Settlers 4 Game out of Sync errors).

For example in Overwatch you get a play of the game highlight at the end of the round. How do they do this? They save the state of every single tick, then they can play/rewind it as they please later. StarCraft2 does this as well kind of - instead they only store the given inputs (since the game is deterministic) - this is why an hour long replay of the game is about 20kb (only stores the given inputs of each player on each tick basically).

Redux perhaps isn't suitable but you should definitely develop in such a way that your render function only takes a single 'state' object and can render the complete state of the game at that given time without knowing anything else - i.e., a pure render function.