There are some great games out there with female protagonists and quality interaction (e.g. The Dreamfall series). There are also many games that bend over backwards to be gender (and sexual orientation) neutral, such as the Mass Effect series. However I have to agree with the poster that adolescent males are far more frequently targeted by any sort of game that actually has a plot. While some might argue that most female gamers simply stay away from such titles, I question this assumption and wonder if this is another instance of the girlie-beer phenomenon.

i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly "girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting, etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures.

Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence? I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time, as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being ignored. It's what they want that's the problem!

It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as "guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy" stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old guy stuff" that everybody, males and probable females alike, start to get itchy trigger fingers.

This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!