Features
Satire as a strategy to foster interpersonal communication and protect sanity amid budget cuts, audits, and snarky reviews: a case study.
Dr Max Hui Bai talks about why he created the Publish or Perish game
By Claudia Civinini
“My game is satirical, but I don’t want to portray academic life negatively.”
"As it encourages interaction with a focus on humour and satire, the game could open up the conversation for academics as well."
"The game’s been taken to a research station in Antarctica, he recounts. But now it’s time to aim higher."
In brief
- "Publish or Perish," a satirical board game, uses humour to tackle the pressures of modern academia.
- Players navigate peer reviews, "academic trash talk" and budget cuts to secure citations while exposing systemic flaws.
- The game acts as a therapeutic tool, sparking honest dialogue about mental health and academia's inherent unfairness.
This article was featured in the QS Midweek Brief newsletter under the title “Play or perish: Satire as an antidote for academic stress”. Sign up for it here.
A theory is like a reality TV show: dramatic, sometimes morally questionable, and undeniably captivating to its devoted fans. Or: introducing your new hypothesis is like launching a conspiracy theory. You’ll have followers, detractors and a lot of people demanding proof.
These are not humorous aphorisms for academics, but ‘theory’ cards from the Publish or Perish board game created by Dr Max Hui Bai.
If you pair these theory cards with a ‘writing’ card and avoid being sabotaged by a ‘budget cut’ or a ‘mishap’ card, you could publish a paper titled “Pointless Meetings: Embracing Inefficiency for Those Who Have Given Up” in the journal Proceedings of Pointless Papers, and get five citations.
Citations are, obviously, the goal. Sounds familiar?
Dr Bai, a social psychologist now Director of the Publish or Perish Game and of the Political Belief Lab, an independent research lab, worried that some academics would consider his satirical board game a form of professional self-sabotage.
But academics and the general public liked it – it was another group, he says, that wasn’t too impressed: professional board game designers and board game enthusiasts.
“They want things that are mechanically balanced, like the Euro board games,” he says.
Euro Games, he explains, are about computation, with minimal interaction between players – such as in chess – and they are fair.
American games, on the other hand, are party games – for example, Monopoly or, especially resonant in this case, Cards Against Humanity and Exploding Kittens. They still entail some strategy, but user interaction and luck play a much bigger role; as such, they perhaps offer a more fitting metaphor for work life – or life in general.
“The game resonated with a lot more people than I anticipated,” Dr Bai says.
“It picked up on the insider perspective, looking at our own lives, looking at complaints we have every day: about the ridiculous parts of the peer review process, the bureaucracy of the university system, all of these things that actually resonate with our lives.”
Audits and haunted houses
The purpose of Publish or Perish is to publish manuscripts and accumulate citations. Action cards allow players to progress or sabotage others – for example, with ‘mishap’ cards with snarky comments (“Your groundbreaking concept? Yeah, it was groundbreaking… in 1985.”), citation errors, Institutional Review Boards audits, and others.
Humorous nods to real-life issues abound in the game. ‘Someone’s paper just got retracted – their citations of your work went down with it’, warns a ‘citation error’ card, while a ‘perseverance’ card titled ‘denial of job market reality’ reads ‘blissfully ignoring job prospects, you press on with unwavering determination.’
Despite being branded as ‘useless nonsense’, the manuscripts, each complete with an abstract, an author, a journal title and a department, are laugh-out-loud satirical snippets. Procrastination is a very frequent topic. Unproductive meetings, predatory journals and echo chambers also make an appearance, among many other pressing questions such as blood-type diets for vampires, zombie fitness routines, or whether haunted houses are just a case of bad plumbing.
Throughout the game, players are encouraged to interact: by complimenting each other when publishing (clapping is compulsory), defending one’s research, and, most importantly, giving each other comments and using ‘academic trash talk’ – backhanded compliments or unconstructive criticism disguised as questions are explicitly encouraged in the instructions. An impressive range of trivia questions offers another occasion to interact, and to reflect on the beauty of the pursuit of knowledge.
“My game is satirical, but I don’t want to portray academic life negatively,” Dr Bai explains.
“There are reasons why people stay in it: the intellectual pursuit, the discovery of knowledge… I wanted to highlight that too.”
Taking on a new persona
Because the game emphasises communication, Dr Bai says that a researcher and a therapist have approached him about using it as an intervention. The researcher is testing it with patients who have traumatic brain injuries, while the therapist is using it in their work with children and young adults.
“One of the hardest things you do as a therapist is just to get people to talk to you, particularly kids,” Dr Bai explains, and playing a game can help.
But mental health is notoriously difficult for everyone to talk about, and researchers are no exception – some feel they are expected to put on a ‘brave face’, as a researcher said in a previous feature on mental health in academia.
As it encourages interaction with a focus on humour and satire, the game could open up the conversation for academics as well.
“When you give people a game where there's almost no boundary on things, I'm hoping that it will open up the channel for people to talk about some of the things that people traditionally perceive as taboo in their workplace, because when you're in a game, you're taking a new persona,” Dr Bai explains.
“It also helps open up a broader conversation about the issues: the mental health issue, bureaucracy and some of the unfairness in the system.”
His thinking about the publish-or-perish culture evolved over time, he comments. “In the beginning, I kept saying that this is all bad and toxic in many ways, which it is.
“It is bad for people's mental health. It is bad for researchers who are putting in effort and never getting a reward. But the more I think about it, what I realise is that it's a systemic issue that is inherently unfixable.”
Any environment with an asymmetric reward system – where even if everyone puts in the same amount of work and effort, only a handful of people will reach the top rewards – is a winner-takes-all system, he explains, adding that it doesn’t only affect researchers, but also entrepreneurs and artists.
“The system is inherently unfair,” he says – and luck plays an essential role.
The publish-or-perish culture has also been blamed for placing emphasis on quantity rather than quality and, in some instances, encouraging fraud.
“In any asymmetric system, there are always people who try to cheat the system. But then we have the self-corrective measures,” Dr Bai says, mentioning examples of corrective measures such as Retraction Watch or researchers interrogating the reproducibility of psychology studies.
“There are always people who are going to cheat – then the question is: is there a natural process for the field to do something to self-correct and fix it?”
However, now he’s also an entrepreneur as well as a researcher, Dr Bai doesn’t see much difference in the work-life balance of the two environments.
“If you want to do something creative, do something new, something that's impactful, you have to take on a work process that's not conventional, not a 9-to-5,” he says.
Unconventional choices
Dr Bai grew up in Beijing, China, the son of an artist and a Chinese medicine practitioner.
He credits his father, a poet and a writer, for giving him a desire to follow unconventional routes.
“He is a very creative person who didn’t follow the authoritarian doctrine that was very common in China at that time. That was really helpful for me to see the world differently.”
Instead of studying in China and finding a job there, Dr Bai moved to the US for his undergraduate studies.
He attended the University of Minnesota and, interested in pursuing psychological research, eventually completed a PhD and became a social psychology researcher investigating the consequences of social chance and the role of ideological beliefs.
His journey into game designing began with an entrepreneurship course he took at Stanford. Then, during a game night with colleagues, he mentioned it’d be fun to have a board game about a researcher’s work life.
People jumped on the idea, he recalls.
Shooting for the stars
For Dr Bai, academia and entrepreneurship have a lot more in common than just a hectic work life.
“You follow the same fundamental principle: you have a goal, and you have all these tools in your hand. How can you combine the tools in your hand to get to the goal? Designing an experiment is the same thing as designing a game. It may feel like you are transitioning into a completely different role, but I realise I'm doing the same thing,” he explains.
Starting out with what he describes as zero background in game design, he trained himself with books and blogs, which he thinks took him about 50 hours of work. “You're just doing the same thing as a researcher. You have to keep reading new papers, you have to keep updating your knowledge,” he adds.
Now, Dr Bai is developing several other games – all covering various cultural trends, all somewhat satirical in tone, and all aiming to help people create connections with each other, he explains.
As for the Publish or Perish game, he is still surprised by how little control he has over where it goes and how people use it now that it’s out in the world.
The game’s been taken to a research station in Antarctica, he recounts. But now it’s time to aim higher.
“I hope one day NASA will bring this game to space,” he says.
“If you can put this in the article: if NASA ever wants this game in space, or in their training station on the ground, I am very happy to send them a copy!”