Life & Wisdom Quote by Mike Wilson

There is something almost defiantly un-literary in Mike Wilson planting his flag on KISS Psycho Circus, a loud, licensed shooter whose main virtue is that it does not pretend to improve you. The sentence is built like a small act of resistance: “current favorite” signals taste as a moving target, but “I’m not ashamed” is the real payload. He’s responding to a culture of gamer self-justification, where liking something “mindless” supposedly requires an alibi. By naming shame outright, he exposes the implied hierarchy that puts “exploration” and “adventure” on the tasteful, narratively enriching shelf and relegates simple combat to guilty-pleasure status.

Wilson’s word choices are doing double duty. “Mindless fun” is a preemptive disarm: he takes the insult before anyone can throw it. “Blasting hordes” is gleefully crude, a sensory verb paired with faceless masses, promising rhythm and release rather than discovery. The subtext isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-performative: he’s tired of games (and gamers) needing to sound like novels to be respectable.

Contextually, this reads like a late-90s/early-2000s skirmish in the ongoing debate about games as art versus games as toys. Wilson isn’t arguing that shooters are deeper than people think; he’s arguing you shouldn’t need depth as a cover story. The intent is permission-giving, but with a writer’s edge: a reminder that pleasure, uncredentialed and unoptimized, is still a legitimate aesthetic choice.