In Don’t Get Fired!, players struggle, and inevitably fail, at a series of soul-sucking office jobs.

Last month in Wired, the writer Mary H. K. Choi embedded herself in the social-media world of five American teen-agers, exploring their habits and codes of conduct on an array of platforms, chiefly Snapchat and Instagram. Her report was refreshingly free of the sorts of scandalizing details that typically pervade writing about teens, replaced, instead, by a set of heartening and counterintuitive insights. For instance: teens, in point of fact, believe that oversharing on social media is one of the gravest sins one can commit. (Posting back-to-back selfies is a huge no-no.) According to one boy, a smiley-face emoji represents a form of rejection from the opposite sex. One of the most surprising moments in the story concerns Ubakum, a fifteen-year-old Texas girl with an affinity for phone games. Among her favorites, Choi mentions, is an app called Don’t Get Fired!, in which players struggle to remain employed at a series of office gigs. “I’ve been fired from 25 jobs,” Ubakum says in the article. It is a wonderfully ridiculous thought: teens in 2016, toiling thanklessly in digital cubicles, almost a decade, at least, before they will enter the workforce.

I was curious to see how exactly corporate misery could appeal to a high schooler, so I downloaded the game, the icon for which shows three tiny pixelated people in business attire. Built by Korean developers, Don’t Get Fired! is billed as a way to “experience the extremely harsh working conditions in Korea.” Each player, I discovered, must painstakingly advance through a series of job types: internship, contract job, part-time job, and finally full-time job, a process of advancement that is maddening by design. You’re rendered helpless as you sit through a series of fruitless internship interviews, which generally conclude with a notice that you won’t be hired: “You failed the interview,” the game explains coldly. Once you finally do earn a spot at the bottom of the totem pole at a generic corporation, the climb to the next realm—a contract job—only steepens further. All that wisdom gained while fumbling through internships is suddenly rendered obsolete. After a handful of firings in rapid succession, the game begins to take on an absurdist quality. The firings become funny.

Like a crude, animated version of the movie “Office Space,” Don’t Get Fired! captures the deadened hamster-wheel ambience of office life. The game’s crude graphics render each workplace in identically depressing detail: a bunch of bobbing workers lined up at rows of computers, the only sounds the ambient car-traffic noises from outside and the clicking of keyboards. The nature of the work you are striving to complete is never specified, which enhances the sensation that you are an anonymized corporate drone. (“I don’t need to play this game, I’m living it,” one user wrote on a Reddit thread about the difficulties of the game.) As players go along through company after indistinguishable company, they pick up generic “experience” chips. You can earn these chips by working—which simply entails clicking on exclamation points that pop up around co-workers’ heads—or you can earn them by accumulating randomly generated “Why you got fired” cards, which proves to be the only easy part of the game: “You got fired because you didn’t take work from your boss”; “You’re too sick to work”; “You were fired because you worked too hard.” Sometimes a company just goes bust, at which point the game explains, “There’s no more work to do.” Virtually nothing can be done to protect oneself from such job-market turbulence. The game even warns, periodically, that those who’ve discovered cheat codes online will have a harder time advancing. (If only the real world worked the same way.)

One source of the game’s appeal, I suspect, is the almost farcical severity of the term “fired.” Whereas being “let go” or “laid off” is a source of limp despair, being told that you are fired connotes volatility, friction, drama. When Donald Trump began hosting “The Apprentice,” in the early two-thousands, the producers reportedly wanted him to use a gentle catchphrase to dismiss contestants: “We need to let you go,” or “Unfortunately, your time here is over.” But when Trump ad-libbed “You’re fired,” the show runners knew they’d struck gold. (If not for the thrill of that phrase, we might not be witnessing the current spectacle of the 2016 Presidential race.) Outside of reality TV, though, being fired is increasingly rare in today’s workforce. Voluntary exits are now about twice as common as firings and discharges, a gap that has been widening steadily since the Great Recession. Young people entering the workforce today are more likely to bounce from job to job by choice, or collect a patchwork of contract and part-time work, than to be hired and summarily dismissed.

Still, there is at least one aspect of Don’t Get Fired! that feels almost frighteningly relevant to the real world. The only substantive control a player has in the game is the ability to weigh her avatar’s health against the quantity of work she performs—what many of us striving Americans would call the question of “work-life balance.” On this subject, the game takes a particularly nihilistic position. If you take on too much work and your health drops to zero before you’ve racked up thirty experience points, you lose your job. If you preserve your health rating by working less, you will likely be fired for lack of productivity. This juggling of well-being against work ethic is the toughest, and most futile, aspect of the game; in the world of Don’t Get Fired!, it is all but impossible to fulfill one’s ambitions while staying sane and healthy at the same time. In this respect, as pre-professional training goes, high-school kids could do worse.