Game Changers

Helene Juguet, senior director of marketing at Ubisoft, says the company is still learning how best to appeal to girls. She believes that one day the distinctions between what the company offers as "girl" games and the rest of its titles will fade.

"Eventually, as video games become a medium that is more accepted, the difference will go away," she says. "It won't be a matter of there being a genre that is popular with one gender or another."

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Could be. Some girls and women are already picking up the game controller and trying out titles that are usually thought of as strictly for guys.

Gabriel Ralte, a 28-year-old nursing student from India who lives in Silver Spring, says she likes to play Grand Theft Auto IV to unwind and do things she wouldn't try in the real world.

Ralte had never played video games before coming to the United States, but her boyfriend is a gamer, so she decided to give his Xbox 360 a try. She thought a tennis game he bought for her was pretty good, but she mainly loves GTA. She's now further along in the game than he is.

"To some people it's very weird that I play video games," she says. "When I mention it to my classmates, they're like, 'I can't believe you're actually playing Grand Theft Auto -- you don't look like a violent person!' "

Women have also been playing bigger roles as workers in the video game industry. Yvette Nash, who works as an international producer at the Fairfax-based game studio EA Mythic, says that although there are many more men than women at the studio, "it's not something I notice when I walk into the office."

EA Mythic is scheduled to launch its newest game this week, a virtual world called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It's in the same sword-and-sorcery genre as the mega-popular World of Warcraft, in which players pay a monthly subscription fee to take on virtual roles. Nash is in charge of the game's online launch outside of the United States.

Virtual-world games have always had a larger share of women players than other games, Nash says. That's probably because they are often as much about collaborating as a team, or just hanging out, as they are about going on adventures.

Having a diverse group of players can improve missions. "When you have a healthy mix of guys and girls going on a raid, it helps with the tactics," Nash says. Guys sometimes want to run in and fight the monsters without coming up with a strategy. With women on the team, she says, "there's a lot more 'Have we thought this through?' "

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