Hmm yeah I see where you're coming from. A lot of affiliate marketing seems really sleazy to me as well. Here I'm trying to provide a bit of value on top of the advertisement.
Rather than buying search ads and making money of pure arbitrage, I made a game that might inspire people to read about the technologies used in the game. Then I follow up with links.
Why not?
It is text only and at first I did not even notice it.
Hopefully not only the HN crowd will play the game so it would take a exrtra "Show HN only" landing page without adds to get rid of them.
I've certainly complained about affiliate links before, but at least in this case they were somewhat related to the reason HN might be interested in the post.