Credit: Adapted from Getty
A few weeks ago, a colleague sent me the kind of message that usually means I’m about to lose three hours of my life: “You have to try this!” Included was a link to an online Chinese-language game called Green Pepper Simulator — a play on words based on the fact that qingjiao, the slang term for ‘young faculty’, sounds like the word for ‘green pepper’. (A WeChat ‘mini program’ version is also available.)
The premise is simple — you assume the role of an early-career academic trying to survive the next six years, the length of time many new researchers in China are given to secure a permanent position. In the game, you chase grants, publish papers, recruit students, handle teaching and manage relationships, all while trying to keep your mental health from hitting zero.
I clicked out of curiosity. But I stayed because the gameplay felt uncomfortably familiar. Green Pepper Simulator distils academics’ day-to-day workload into a dashboard: grant success rates, publication timelines, student attrition and endless deadlines. And it makes the threat feel immediate. Even if you do everything ‘right’, the outcome is still beyond your control. For many players — especially early-career faculty members — that’s not just dark humour. It could fuel anticipatory anxiety about their future.
In one run-through, I did what I thought any sensible new principal investigator would do — I focused on writing a grant, tried to get one solid paper out and met students regularly. The grant failed, a student dropped out and a paper came back with a request for “major revisions” that really meant “don’t bother”.
At that point, one of the game’s key metrics became hard to ignore: my mental-health bar was falling faster than my publication count was rising. Eventually, the game offered me various bleak endings, including dismissal, a transfer to a job in campus security and janitorial work. I laughed. Then I realized I wasn’t laughing because it was absurd. I was laughing because it resonated.
Playing the system
On social media, players traded walk-throughs and winning strategies: optimize your output; don’t spend too much time mentoring; pick safe topics; diversify funding; minimize meetings; and keep your ‘stress points’ under control. What struck me wasn’t the quality of the advice (some of which was questionable), but the fact that so many researchers immediately understood the logic of the system the game was modelling.
According to the China Science Daily, between the game’s official launch on 16 December 2025 and 8 January 2026, Green Pepper Simulator attracted nearly 600,000 players. But the anxiety and constraints reflected in the game are not unique to China; they are problems that researchers around the world are grappling with. The reason this game struck such a chord with so many early-career academics is that it mirrors three lessons from their real working lives.
When you’re graded on a metric, the metric becomes your goal
The simulator turns academic life into a dashboard: papers, grants, reputation, teaching load, student numbers and mental health. Watch them go up or down at each turn, and you quickly learn what the system rewards: metrics.
Research metrics are not evil. We need ways to evaluate quality and progress, and we need to fund people fairly. But anyone who has spent time in research knows the slippery moment when the measurement becomes the mission. You stop asking “Is this a good question?” and start asking “Will this count?”. You start choosing projects not because they are important, but because review committees say they matter.
The simulator shows how easily a researcher’s inner life can come to be driven by external targets. When your worth is constantly translated into counts and scores, it’s not surprising that many people feel anxious, even when they’re doing well. Numbers rarely say, “you’re enough”.
Uncertainty is exhausting
The most draining part of the game isn’t the workload, it’s the randomness. You can do all the ‘right’ things, and still fail. A grant review goes cold, a journal rejects your paper or a family issue arises at the wrong time.
The simulator compresses these events into a few clicks, but the emotions are real: the sense that you’re only ever one unlucky roll away from falling behind, and that falling behind is not a temporary state, but a career-defining one. People experiencing those kinds of feelings often take fewer risks, both scientifically and personally. They also tend to blame themselves for outcomes they couldn’t control.
