[simonbw]

It's been an incredibly useful pattern for me in game development. I have a hard time imagining making a game with any level of complexity without it. You can definitely go overboard with it, but I have a hard time even imagining how some systems like collision detection/a physics engine could even work without it.

[ClimaxGravely]

That's generally been my experience as well.

However I've seen some frameworks where you can do collision imperatively. For example

if (sprite.collide(tilemap)) {do something}

These are generally on smaller less taxing frameworks (in this case I'm referring to haxeflixel) but they do exist!