Apparently, it was designed to teach the hjkl keys. It's likely a few other vim games already exist (vim has every feature you can imagine, and then some). After I've played some video games, Vim actually feels like a video game to me.
Except for its learning cliff. However, when I put together regular expressions, I use new features by trial and error at first, and this is quite like a game. Try it, press u, edit and try again, press u. That's a feedback loop, as in the game; just turn-based instead of real-time. lisp/python/ruby/bash etc REPLs are similar.
Stack Overflow is another application patterned on a gaming badge/reward system. On the Stack Overflow podcasts, Jeff talked about how he was deliberately copying the XBox idea of badges for rewarding specific achievements and unlocking additional functionality.
This is a great presentation - thanks for posting.