Jayne Mellon's brother would not let her paint his toenails, so she played with his computer games instead. The 18-year-old from Doncaster started off on an old Amstrad computer eight years ago, and soon became addicted to classic titles such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat.

She believes that games are a great way of alleviating life's pressures: "When I first started playing games, they allowed me to escape from the various stresses in my life, like coursework and friends.

Shooting things now and again was good for relieving tension."

Die-hard gamers such as Jayne are among the growing number of women who play games as a hobby, and they are no longer vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts. According to a recent report by the Entertainment Software Association in America, as many university-aged women as men are now regularly playing games, and women over 18 constitute a quarter of the gaming market, outnumbering the teenage boys who are traditionally seen as the typical demographic.

In the UK, research by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association confirms that, while women do not play as many games as men, they continue to buy and play games as they get older, while male interest declines over time.

Yet, despite their burgeoning buying power, women are still poorly served by the industry, which has been slow to realise the size and spending power of a largely untapped market. Depictions of stylised violence and large-breasted female characters dressed in leather handkerchiefs have, unsurprisingly, earned the industry something of a lad-mag image. But games are growing up.

The industry is now worth Pounds 4.1 billion in Europe alone. Clearly, games publishers can no longer afford to rely solely on established core audiences - 18 to 30-year-old men and young children - and are being forced to focus on those who are slipping through the net, particularly women.

"Female gamers have always been there, but companies are only now starting to realise their potential as an audience. So we're seeing more of them 'coming out'," said Samantha Loveday, editor of MCV, the trade magazine for the computer-games industry. "As the games market strives to be more mass-market, we need to be seen to be appealing to everyone."

Liz Burnett, 20, from Norwich, discovered the action game Quake on her boyfriend's computer and proceeded to steal his game discs so that she could play it on her own machine. She was so taken with it that she decided to start her own gaming group.

Over the past two years, Liz and her clan - dubbed "What Women Want" - have travelled the country to take part in large gaming events, where people link up their machines and play team-based games against one another.

"You never see an advert or a review for a game in a women's magazine, yet women are playing and enjoying them. There should be more emphasis on games because they make you feel good, and that's more important than looking good," said Burnett.

While gaming still struggles to shrug off its image as a pursuit for teenage boys locked alone in their bedrooms for hours on end, women are drawn to the social aspect of competing as a team.