Smash hit

"Being part of a close-knit clan is brilliant. It is more exciting going to a tournament together, because you know you're going to have a good time, even if you play horribly and come last," said Leanne Dignan, 19, from Manchester, the captain of the 4Kings Ladies Counter-Strike team.

Discovering what makes a game appeal to either sex, let alone women in particular, is a continual battle for the designers of games.

Yet two long-running titles that have helped to attract women are The Sims, a detailed virtual doll's-house game for grown-ups (see review below), and the long- running SimCity franchise, in which you create and run your own metropolis. Both titles were developed by Maxis Studios, and both have managed to sell millions of copies to male and female gamers across the world. So what are the vital ingredients that make them so appealing?

"For a long time, there has been a misconception that women don't like to build.

Women do like to build, but in a context," says Lucy Bradshaw, executive designer at Maxis Studios. "In SimCity, you're building in a very creative and challenging way. The Sims also has a social context, because you're interacting with these little virtual lives."

A more direct attempt to hook the female gamer has been through titles specifically designed for younger girls. One company that tried this approach is the much-publicised Purple Moon, a US studio that set out in 1996 to create games for 10 to 14-year-old girls.

Despite credible attempts to create a series of games around a girl called Rockett and her gal pals, the studio closed two years later and was eventually amalgamated into Barbie's pink gaming empire.

Why did this attempt to reach out to the girl gamers fail so badly? "I don't want to be segregated or given special treatment," said Burnett. "Maybe it would work for young girls, and I like the idea of getting them into games early. But I think it's more about making games that appeal to both sexes."

While many women may have neither the time nor the inclination to sit down at a computer or console and play for hours at a time, one arena that is starting to attract female admirers is portable and mobile gaming.

The television presenter Aleks Krotoski, who has embarked on a PhD in gaming at the University of Surrey, predicts that this could result in a big uptake among female players. "Women might not want to spend their cash on a Game Boy Advance, but, like everyone, they have a phone and they're probably already playing games.

As simple as those are, mobile games are helping expose more people to a world that they may not have taken time to explore."

Whether "borrowing" their boyfriend's Xbox or touring with their own clans, girls of all ages are embracing gaming with as much enthusiasm and zeal as their male counterparts. It seems the only people who really need to catch up are games developers, who, if they really want games to compete with film and music as mainstream entertainment, need to address their audience not as male or female, but simply as gamers. In the meantime the sisters are definitely doing it for themselves.