This week Microsoft put a $149 camera on store shelves that lets you play games by flailing at your television with no controller in your hands at all. Kinect is the answer to four straight years of watching Nintendo print money with a waggle stick, and it is the most extreme version of that idea anyone has tried: do not improve the controller, delete it.

Two months ago Sony went the other way and shipped PlayStation Move, a glowing wand paired with a camera, which is essentially a Wii Remote built to a higher tolerance. So within one autumn you have Sony refining the waggle stick and Microsoft throwing the stick out entirely, and both companies are sprinting after the exact same prize: the enormous casual audience the Wii found in 2006 that nobody else has been able to reach since.

Kinect itself is a clever piece of kit, a depth camera doing skeletal tracking with voice on top, and Microsoft is branding the whole thing as controller-free gaming. The early sales are berserk; it is on a pace to become the fastest-selling consumer-electronics device anyone has bothered to measure. Whether the games justify the hardware is a different and much quieter question, because for every Dance Central there is a stack of arm-waving shovelware already piling up behind it.

The story underneath the motion circus is that the hardcore war everyone wrote off in 2007 has quietly gotten close again. Microsoft engineered the Red Ring nightmare out of the 360 with a slim redesign, and the PlayStation 3 finally found its feet after its own slim model and a real price cut, with the exclusive lineup Sony promised four years ago showing up four years late but showing up. The two boxes the Wii left for dead are both healthy now, which is not how this generation looked at the halfway point.

I will admit I am skeptical of the entire motion gold rush, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The Wii’s magic was never the technology, it was Wii Sports landing as the right toy at the right price in the right living rooms. Move and Kinect are both more sophisticated than anything in a Wii, and I am not convinced either one bottles that same lightning. Strapping motion onto a hardcore console aimed at people who already own and like a controller is a fundamentally different problem from selling a $249 toy to a family that owns none.

Nintendo reorganized the whole industry around an idea it half-stumbled into, and that is the real headline of 2010: Sony and Microsoft spent the entire year building elaborate answers to a four-year-old question. Kinect is going to sell like mad this Christmas. Whether anyone is still waving at their TV in two years is a bet I would not put money on either side of. The Wii’s lead is still enormous, but for the first time it has stopped growing, and everyone in the room can smell it.

The Console War, in Order