One of the singular moments in video games came in late 1996 or so, when players first rested their thumbs on the small, flat-topped joystick of the Nintendo 64 to play Super Mario 64. When the joystick was gently nudged forward, Mario, an affectionately disproportional clump of polygons, slowly took a step into a blocky, brightly colored, three-dimensional world for the first time. He walked. When the stick was pushed down, hard, he ran. This kind of control, within a massive, three-dimensional world, felt genuinely liberating compared to the confined, largely two-dimensional play of the previous generation of video games. It felt new.

The promise of every new gaming console is a novel set of experiences, like that moment, and each generation of machines typically has a defining one. The systems that emerged in the mid-nineties, the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64, brought console gaming into three dimensions in a profound way; the following generation, of the early aughts, in particular the Dreamcast and the Xbox, allowed console gamers to compete against each other online, rather than via split-screen. The most recent generation of consoles, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii, which launched in the mid-aughts, delivered high-definition graphics, sophisticated motion controls, or both.

By that measure, the question to ask of the new video-game consoles from Sony and Microsoft, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, released earlier this month, is simple: what’s new? The answer so far: not much.

To be sure, the four-hundred-dollar PlayStation 4 and five-hundred-dollar Xbox One are the most powerful and most intricately designed gaming consoles ever engineered. The PS4 is a black, flattened parallelepiped, bisected by a glowing strip of light. It is not only sleeker than the Xbox One, a simplistic, angular hunk of plastic, it’s significantly more compact. Although the PS4 possesses more raw computational power, both systems have similar silicon viscera: an eight-core central processing unit, a graphics processor with multitudes of cores, gigabytes of fast memory, hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and wireless networking.

The One and the PS4 are perhaps best understood by the fact that the gap between them and the previous generation of consoles, from nearly a decade ago, is more accurately measured in products and services, not years: Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix streaming, the iPad, the iPhone, Apple TV, Roku, and Android. In other words, the world is littered with far more screens, many of them touchable, and it is vastly more connected than the one of seven years ago. The One and PS4 are reactions to this reality. While both consoles are made with a deep awareness that the television and personal computer are no longer the only screens in the house, the PlayStation 4 is unabashedly a gaming device; its most interesting features are directly tied to gaming, while non-gaming features, like video services, often feel perfunctory. The Xbox One, as its name portends, wants to do it all, and attempts to put every feature on the same level as gaming, from streaming video to Skype to an integrated TV guide, which makes it more ambitious, if more scatter-brained, than the PlayStation.

The consoles of the nineties and the early aughts had little in the way of an “interface”: you’d pop in a game, turn the system on, and play. By this measure, the One and PS4 require a lot of work to play. Not only must you install games before you play them, they both feature interfaces as elaborate as your smartphone. While both allow you to juggle multiple tasks with aplomb—the Xbox One has three distinct operating systems to handle everything, and does so more ably than the PS4—neither are particularly fun to navigate, which seems odd for devices built strictly for entertainment. The PlayStation 4’s interface appears simple at first, with its frequent reliance on long, horizontal rows of tiles to present choices, but, save for the occasional lush splash screen highlighting a movie to rent in the store, it quickly feels both staid and cumbersome. Sony’s aesthetic choices often feel dated; the PlayStation’s recurring soft blue background looks like anodyne wallpaper ripped from a Mac several years ago. The One’s interface, a haphazard jumble of animated tiles scattered across a handful of screens, is of a piece with Microsoft’s Windows and Windows Phone design language; it is aggressively modern, just as aggressively animated, and dominated by large, simple polygons. Its most ingenious feature is called Snap, which allows you to dedicate a small section of the screen to an app like Skype, so that you can video-chat as you cut the throats of rebellious barbarians in Ryse: Son of Rome, or to Internet Explorer, so that you can look up how to perform fatalities in Killer Instinct mid-fight. But, even though the Xbox One is better than the PS4 as a general computing interface, getting to whatever you want to watch or play often feels like swimming through an ocean of icons, unless you use the device’s voice commands to teleport you directly to where you want to go.

This is why the Xbox One costs a hundred dollars more than the PlayStation 4: it is bundled with an updated, far more sensitive version of its motion-sensing, speech-detecting Kinect peripheral, a chunky strip of plastic that sits wide-eyed in front of your television, staring back at you. Its infrared camera is now so refined that it can detect folds in clothing and individual fingers—or recognize you perfectly every time you sit in front of it—while its wider field of view means it is now usable for motion-based gameplay even in a cramped New York living room. Its refined speech capabilities allow any aspect of the system to be controlled by your voice, though its tendency to flub those commands is disappointing, particularly in a cramped New York living room; I can only imagine the depth of my upstairs neighbor’s sympathy whenever I pleaded, in progressively louder and whinier tones, for my Xbox to power on, turn down the volume, or, maybe most embarrassingly of all, Bing a movie I wanted to watch. When it works, you feel like you do when a puppy doesn’t poop on your carpet for the first time.

The PlayStation 4 also has a camera peripheral, but it is an optional, sixty-dollar add-on, and is far less useful. Rather, Sony’s scheme for evolving the way we manipulate games is a mild reinvention of its existing controller, which has at its heart a touch-sensitive, clickable trackpad, much like a MacBook’s, adding swipes to a gamer’s existing repertoire of button mashing and joystick grinding. The controller also has a new button: share.

We may look back at these consoles as the first truly social ones, but, in some ways, their efforts to wrestle with a newly social world feel awkward and forced: Facebook Newsfeed-like activity streams have bloomed like weeds, reporting in detail what and how you and your friends are playing. Some games, like Battlefield 4, even have their own dedicated social network beyond Microsoft and Sony’s; absurdly, these sub-social networks also encourage you to share your gaming activity directly to Facebook, virtually insuring that all of your friends will be gamers, since the rest of them will unfriend you after the twentieth update about your latest weapon unlock. (Unlike Facebook, Xbox Live, PlayStation Plus and their respective online networks continue to rely on pseudonyms, rather than real names.)