OK, I'm curious now.
I've seen a lot of comments from two of you (you and tptacek) here on HN, and never noticed anything in those that would have led me to guess either of you had a sufficient interest in gaming to want to start a gaming company.
Did I just not notice your comments indicating a gaming interest, or were you wise enough to stay out of gaming threads knowing they usually turn to pointless time wasting crap, or what?
Would I self-identify as a gamer? Well, "Ran a WoW raid guild", "I main AD Jungle Evelynn but haven't gotten many games in since having a kid", "My Steam account lists 720 hours of playtime on 60 games."
I don't particularly hide this on HN and also don't particularly go out of my way to talk about it. Games, books, and running software companies are my three big hobbies; one of these seems to be most relevant here. You can probably find 5~10 comments from me if you search for WoW, Warcraft, LoL, or Starcraft, but mostly they're talking about business, like you would expect.
If it helps Thomas sleep better at night, I'd definitely encourage you describe your products as "experiences" instead, because seriously. Games ain't trivial.
Anyone who describes their thing as an "experience" automatically gets -1000 points. IME, when the description of a thing says that it's an "experience", it's a strong indicator that the marketing copywriter ran out of fluff words to use and reached for the most trendy and inoffensive one they could find.
It's okay if there's a lot of surrounding substantive description that makes it clear that the folks behind the thing are legit, and that "experience" was just added to meet a buzzword quota. If -however- much or all of your description centers around how much of an "experience" it is, I'm likely to skip over whatever it is that you're hawking. :(
We spend much of our childhood doing accelerated learning through play (games). There's no reason that can't continue into adulthood, except for it culturally being slightly unacceptable. That's really counter-productive.
Also: we're very much structured like a conventional CTF; it's just a CTF we're not taking down after a few days.
"Challenges" or "programming challenges" sounds good to me.
The textfile was a fun read, best of luck!
Monetization is through taking people that have both completed and/or done really well in this game and are interested in new employment, and after a few in-person meetings with the Ptaceks and Patrick, you might get a private lunch with a CTO looking to hire (in their words, IIRC). They would get finders fees for that.