I recently acquired, as part of The Tax Museum (http://www.thetaxmuseum.org), a game named “Screw the I.R.S.”. I have added it to the other tax games I have: “Stick the IRS” and “Beat the Reaper: The game of Creative Tax Evasion Planning”. There are more IRS/Tax games available I have yet to acquired. There is “Audit: The Tax Game”, “Challenge the IRS”, “Taxdodger”, “Ax Your Tax”, “Tax Evasion”, “The IRS Game”, “IRS”, and even the Atari game, “Tax Avoiders” (which looks amazing, you jump over literal red tape in one level).
So what is it about our annual interaction with the government that is so prone to be turned into games? It may be that it is just too easy to see the back-and-forth between the taxpayer and the IRS as a zero-sum game, where one person will win, and the other lose. While the real-life version makes us nervous and stressed, making light of such a stressful event makes it less stressful.
I don’t know of many other regulatory processes, or interactions that we have with the federal government, that have been turned into games. Likewise, I don’t know of an area where a blatant disregard for the law has been made to look so fun (Grand Theft Auto notwithstanding).
Or, it may be that tax accountants, preparing returns for entrepreneurial clients all day, want to try their hand at a small money-making venture, and so stick to what they know best—taxes. This notion is supported by the maker of “Beat the Reaper”, above, being created by “BTE Enterprises Inc.” It just feels so much like an accountant to create an entity just to start selling a deck of cards.
As far as I can tell, all of these games were created in the 1980s and early 90s. Has the fun in paying taxes died out since then?
