Ok, video games have peaked. There's a visual novel coming out that supposedly actually prepares your 2022 US federal tax return through romancing an anime girl. I…. man, this is a lot. https://t.co/TR3XMMruYM pic.twitter.com/am2gk9Iodu — HDKirin (@HD_Kirin) March 22, 2023 Look, they said, the newest scam to harvest Social Security numbers! So easy, even a …
Late Night Open Thread: Taxing PrepPost + Comments (40)
Filing taxes is, at its core, an exercise in sharing personal data, and that makes Tax Heaven 3000 look potentially very very unusual in terms of what it asks players to hand over: It’s one thing to take your taxes to H&R Block, but something else altogether to hand them over to an anime girl in a videogame. Daniel Greenberg, the co-founder of developer MSCHF, acknowledged that worry but told Kotaku that the game does not connect to the internet—presumably why you have to handle the actual filing yourself…
MSCHF is an art collective that “subverts mass/popular culture and corporate operations as tools for critique and intervention.” Among other things, it’s the company that teamed up with Lil Nas X to make Satan Shoes, a collaboration that led it into a legal beef with Nike. Still, I’d be awfully iffy about dropping my tax details into Tax Heaven 3000—which is to say, I just wouldn’t do it. Valve apparently had similar concerns, because a day after the game’s Steam page went live, it was taken down.
Just before the store page was wiped, MSCHF updated the store page description to say that Steam was “deplatforming” the game—visible via SteamDB (opens in new tab)—and hinted that “maybe TurboTax sent a check” to make it happen. I assume that’s not a serious allegation, but MSCHF definitely has some beef with TurboTax and other companies like it…
“Most wealthy countries make tax filing free, if the burden of preparation is even passed along to individuals at all. TurboTax actively seeks to backdoor the regulatory structure that could otherwise seek to rein it in. And it works! The villainous corporation that controls the government from the shadows is a sadly mundane reality. It’s the most boring industry imaginable.”
Tax Heaven 3000, the site states, is essentially a response to that: Where TurboTax is predicated on the “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” people have about taxes, Tax Heaven 3000 is “built on parasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness.”
“All of TurboTax’s cutesy loading animations are fake graphics; TH3K simply makes the fiction the point,” the site states. “For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain in the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. TH3K is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.”…
Greenberg said MSCHF isn’t looking to get Tax Heaven 3000 back on Steam, which I suppose is understandable since it doesn’t know why it was removed in the first place. Instead, the game will be available on Itch.io and directly from taxheaven3000.com —pricing isn’t listed but the SteamDB entry for the deleted Steam store page indicates that it will be free to play. A collector’s edition, with a boxed copy of the game and—of course—an Iris body pillow will also be available…
Intuit is in the workshop cooking up the nastiest, most depraved version of TurboTax humans can imagine to respond https://t.co/9y44ybDKmp
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) March 22, 2023
Steam, goddamnit, it is my God-given right to divulge my SSN to the anime woman if I so choose pic.twitter.com/gmnJeSQfag
— Djinn & Tonic ???? (@HegelwCrmCheese) March 23, 2023