There's another way to view this that I think is even more elegant:

You start with facts, which are composed by rules. The current state at any given instant is the fixed point of the derived facts. Provenance is the path through the derivation graph. The whole thing is relational algebra, like SQL or datalog.

A helpful side effect of this perspective is that it can adjust our performance expectations. For example, You can do an in-memory, in-process relational query in microseconds for thousands or millions of rows, way more than any realistic game scene. Incremental updates, etc are nice optimizations, but just let'er rip first and see how fast it goes.

You can even do these kinds of queries fast enough to end up memory bottlenecked if you restrict yourself to queries with fixed graph degree, which is admittedly a mouthful to say (and understand).