Saw this article on Reuters today:

Gina Sutton takes aim and deftly strikes down several targets in a row as they pop up on the screen in front of her.

A self-described girl gamer, she traveled from her home in Virginia to spend her 16th birthday at the Nintendo World Store in New York, and she can’t understand why anyone would think video games are just for boys.

“It’s like saying boys play with action figures and girls play with dolls,” she said as she used a Wii Zapper in a game called . “I’m the girl who plays with action figures.”

With her nimble fingers and bubbling enthusiasm, she is one of a fast-growing posse of female gamers in the United States and elsewhere capturing the attention of video game makers — expanding the market beyond male-appeal games like Grand Theft Auto.

Girls and young women are a “pot of gold” for the industry, said George VanHorn, senior analyst at market research firm IBISWorld. “The gaming industry has market characteristics that many would die for.”

According to IBISWorld, 38 percent of U.S. gamers are female, up from 33 percent in just five years.

From January through August of 2008 females ages 18 to 45 made up 28 percent of the total industry revenue, ranking second to males ages 18 to 45, who made up 37 percent.

Rooster Teeth — the geniuses behind the Halo-based series Red vs Blue — have been on this topic as well in recent days.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the growing demographic of female players; there’s already a goodly number of games in publication, but if the market — especially in the States, but worldwide as well — continues its downturn, publishers and developers will be under additional pressure to produce titles that capture the interest of as many gamers as possible…which means we could, and perhaps should, expect to see more and better titles being released to capture the interest and attention of female gamers.

Of course, that means that developers might just have to step beyond games with titles like “Cooking Momma,” “Master Chef and Babyz,” and “Fashion Designer,” and move the content beyond ponies and makeup. Female gamers, in my experience, are a savvy lot who expect substantive content, and it’s odd to see that in many cases, developers and publishers have responded to the growing demographic of female gamers by publishing content that is the digital equivalent of the Barbie doll.