What sells, ultimately, are "games that span both genders and all ages," Muller notes. Her logic: Yes, sports games are made for sports fans, most of whom are men, "but the women are there, and they, too, are playing the sporting games." She predicts that as video games "become more mainstream, you'll have a wider range of content."

What sells, ultimately, are "great games that provide great entertainment -- period," echoes J.C. Herz, author of "Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds," considered the definitive look at the culture of video games. "Talk of 'girl games,' " she says, is "nonsense," covered in "political correctness."

"Here's the bottom line: All the games that succeed are obsessed with being great entertainment product," says Herz.

So just what do women want?

"When it comes to girls, gaming interests run the gamut," says Phaedra Boinodiris. "Asking what women want to play is like asking what kind of movies women want to watch. It's very divergent. That's what the industry is so slow to realize."

Boinodiris took action in 1999. With her sister, husband and cousin -- all of them "passionate" gamers -- she started Womengamers.com, one of the few women's gaming portals on the Internet.

"It comes down to choices," Boinodiris says. "Women would like better female characters and more of them, and more gender-neutral games where, as a player, you don't have to play a man. It's simple, really. Women want marketing that acknowledges that women gamers do exist."

That's certainly Kat Stamoulis's wish. She has played since the second grade, though she didn't get a PlayStation2 until last Christmas.

"I held out until she was 14," says her mother, Maureen Stamoulis, laughing. "I'm still opposed to it. I still try to limit her playing time. "It's not like she gets C's and D's in school and plays games all day," says Stamoulis, the principal at Cashell Elementary School in Rockville. "She's a good student. She's got other interests." Such as musicals -- she was in the chorus of "Bye Bye Birdie," "Grease," "Guys and Dolls." And books. But video games, mother and daughter agree, trump everything.

Now she is playing GTA3. "I just love, love this game," she says. "I mean, it's just, well, fun. It's hard to explain."

She's on the first level, working for the Italian mafia, driving a Yamaha Banshee -- or, trying to drive -- around Liberty City, USA, "the worst place in America." She (or he, since the character is male) beats four people with a bat, blood splattering on the pavement. She gets $1,000 for that. "When you carjack a taxi," she says, "you get the money, too."

"You can run people over. You can drive like crazy."

But isn't there a part where you can pick up a prostitute, have sex with her, then kill her for the money?

"Yeah, so?" she answers. "It's a game. It's only a game. I don't take it seriously. Come on."

Twenty minutes pass by; an hour and a half.

"Three hours of playing games, if you think about it, is not that much," Kat says. "You've got 24 hours in a day."