[stcredzero]

tl;dr -- Alan Kay emphasized the message passing nature of method dispatch in Smalltalk.

A traditional OOP approach would have much of the functionality taken out of the player objects, using them simply to hold state.

Sounds like C structures. Back in the day, we were always urging and cajoling programmers to stop thinking this way and think more in terms of Objects that knew how to do things in response to messages.