Listen, the pink-haired anime girl is cute. I get it. And doing your taxes in the United States is hard, or so I’ve been told. I don’t live there. But please, for god’s sake, don’t give your social security number to a dating simulator.Tax Heaven 3000 is a visual novel that guides you through doing your taxes, while acting like a dating sim. It’s a cute concept in theory, and I generally think that incentivising and explaining how to file your taxes correctly is a good idea, since nobody teaches you to do it when you’re in school. You go on dates with a girl named Iris where you get to know her, and in the process, you give her personal information, up to and including your social security number.According to the game’s website, the dating simu🎐lator covers your 1040 U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, checks eligibility for Earned Income Tax Credit, American Opportunity Credit amongst others, and is suitable for singles without dependents. I guess Iris doesn’t mess around with couples, and I respect her boundaries.
Tax Heaven 3000 was created by MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based art company behind many marketing stunts you may have seen recently. Most viral of them all were those ugly-ass red boots – just this morning, my friend sent a picture of Hasbulla Magomedov wearing them to the group chat. A week ago, I saw a picture of Giancarlo Esposito wearing them. MSCHF has also been sued by Nike for selling 666 pairs of Nike Air Max 97s called &lsqu🧸o;Satan Shoes’ in collaboration with Lil Nas X. The air bubble in the sole of the sneaker is filled with red ink mixed with drops of blood from MSCHF’s staff, which . That’s their business, but I’m not sure we should be trusting these people with highly personal information about ourselves – it’s clear they’re not 🐟exactly airtight when it comes to legality.
If you go to Tax Heaven 3000’s website, you’ll find a manifesto where MSCHF details its motivations behind creating the game. They’re fairly noble, saying that the game is in opposition to corporate taxꦚ filing services like TurboTax who are, because of their extensive lobbying, ‘predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people’. Tax Heaven 3000 is free software ‘instead built on p🅷arasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness’ rather than the fear of doing your taxes wrong.
MSCHF posits that games are just software, akin to Microsoft Word, and its graphics are just creating fiction – the real point is filing your taxes. Da𓆏niel Greenberg, the co-founder of MSCHF, that the game doesn’t connect to the internet, and that ‘in some sense, it is probably safer than most big-box tax software’. Greenberg says that your personal information is being used to prepare your tax return and nothing else. But I have doubts about how much we should trust an unofficial body with our personal information, even if they say it’s all kept offline. After all, they’re not subject to regulation.
Anyway, even if you wanted to, you can’t – it appears that Tax Heaven 3000 has been removed from Steam, and the itch.io link on its website also shows that the game is currently unavailable. Acc🃏ording to , the note attached to the Steam delisting says the game will be available for direct download from their website on April 4 and that ‘Maybe TurboTax sent a check, we don’t know.’ This might be for the best – I’m sure Steam doesn’t want to be liable for anything bad that this game could lead to.