Look at free to play games, or microtransactions, or even MMOs. Consoles aren't driving those trends at all.

I think you're approaching this from the wrong point of view. You can't take free-to-play games, microtransactions, and MMOs and try to fit them into the console niche.

Consoles have a niche, and it was abandoned years ago by the console industry and game developers. You're acting like we abandoned them. It's just not true.

You want to know why consoles are stagnant? Because the console game development industry is that ignorant of what we want. I don't know how their heads actually arrived up their asses, but I clearly recognized it happening.

My generation fell in love with playing games socially, but you talk about "social gaming" like it was just discovered. The 90s was an era of social gaming. I grew up with 9 brothers and sisters spread across two houses and every one of us had a game we loved playing together.

When the Nintendo 64 came out, my dad bought me one for Christmas. We had one Nintendo to split between everybody. After a while, I accumulated 4 controllers. My favorite was the black one. I always plugged it into the first controller slot. I quickly became the designated Player 1. It was a big responsibility. You had to pick a good game, get through the menus and selections as quick as possible, give everybody a crash course in how to play, and I made it my responsibility to always be on the team with the worst player so that I could give them as much help and encouragement as possible. One game could easily entertain four people.

Then they started marketing to Player 1. I kept finding more and more games that I liked, but they were too complicated or just uninteresting to everyone else. They sacrificed split-screen multiplayer for more polygons. The industry put the spotlight on my needs, and I went from being "Player 1" to the being the only player. Ultimately, I put down my controller and followed everyone else.

Every once and a while I'll find a good game and a chance to share it. One night last year I found an opportunity to introduce three people to Zombie Estate on Xbox Live. One was my wife and the other two were women who had never picked up an Xbox controller in their life, but we had a great time. I got to be Player 1 again.

You look at mobile gaming and you think it provides you with a glimpse into the future, helping you divine the future of gaming. I look at everyone playing games on their phones and I see all the Player 2s, 3s, and 4s in my past. The industry gave them games that are so easy to play that they don't need me to boost them over the learning curve.

Every time my wife has a few minutes to kill, she pulls out her iPhone and pulls up Draw Something. You see her and think that the gaming industry has finally found a way to reach her. I see a girl who grew up with a controller in her hand, but put it down when the industry abandoned her family for a household with Males Age 18-35.

Are consoles dead? I don't care what semantic metaphor you come up with to describe the state they're in. Just don't fool yourself into thinking there aren't millions of people willing to pick up a controller. Game developers just aren't giving people what they want.

We want a dozen people in our living room holding controllers laughing at a tv with a giant bowl of Rotel and a refrigerator full of beer. We don't want a fucking headset and hot pockets.