🎮 PLAY THE GAME HERE: forrt.org/TenureRun
Tenure Run is a browser-based endless runner game built entirely in a single HTML file. It serves as a fun, satirical, and educational metaphor for the modern academic publishing landscape, specifically focusing on the pressure to publish, Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), Article Processing Charges (APCs), and the Open Science movement.
Cite as: Röseler (2026). Tenure Run [Video game]. https://forrt.org/TenureRun/
You are an early-career researcher trapped on the academic treadmill (a giant, scrolling manuscript). You automatically write pages over time, but you must navigate a treacherous landscape to survive.
- Controls: Swipe Left/Right (or Arrow Keys) to switch lanes. Swipe Up (or Up Arrow / Spacebar) to jump.
- Goal: Collect 15 Pages to generate 1 Publication. Gain publications to level up!
- Lives: You start with 3 lives (❤️❤️❤️). Hitting obstacles without protection will cost you a life. Leveling up grants you +1 bonus life.
- 📄 Pages: Gives +2 Pages.
- 🟦 Open Data Badges: Sharing data is highly valuable! Gives +5 Pages.
- 📜 Grants: Research funding! Collecting a grant safely pays for your next 3 APC fees (Grants are stackable).
- 🛡️ Preregistration (Red Badge): Protects you from the dangers and penalties of p-hacking.
- 🟪 p-Hacking (Purple 'p'): A satirical take on Questionable Research Practices. Grabbing this drastically increases your speed (allowing you to gain passive pages much faster), but offers no protection against obstacles unless you Preregistered!
(Note: If you jump, you will safely fly over these obstacles, but you will also fly over any good items!)
- 🧱 Paywalls: Traditional publishing locks knowledge away. These massive walls block 2 out of the 3 lanes. You must switch to the open lane or jump over them.
- 📚 Teaching & Grading: Overflowing "To-Grade" trays and Classroom Chalkboards that block your research path.
- $ APCs (Article Processing Charges): Some "Gold Open Access" journals charge researchers massive fees to publish. Hitting this will give you 1 Publication, but it will drain 1 Life unless you have a Grant to pay for it!
As you publish, you will rank up and your character sprite will change:
- PhD Student: (0 Pubs)
- Postdoc: (3 Pubs)
- Lecturer: (9 Pubs)
- Assistant Professor: (21 Pubs)
- Tenured Professor: (you will never achieve this level, sorry)
While the game is a comical take on the hyper-competitive academic system, the underlying issues are real. Research assessment currently heavily prioritizes quantity (number of publications) and prestige (journal impact factors) over actual research quality.
However, the system is changing. Researchers and institutions worldwide are pushing for fairer, more qualitative evaluations:
- CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment): A global coalition of institutions committing to systemic reform of research assessment.
- SF DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment): An initiative to halt the use of journal-based metrics to evaluate individual researchers. Check out the SF DORA National and International Initiatives. Anyone can sign DORA!
- FORRT (Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training): An excellent community advocating for Open Science, reproducibility, and social justice in higher education. Click here to join FORRT's open Slack channel!
(Note: This game is an independent educational project and is not officially affiliated with DORA and CoARA).