Whatever the actual composition of the gaming population, there's still very much the sense that gaming is a man's world - both in terms of audience and in terms of developers. This isn't to say, of course that there aren't women playing and building all sorts of games. Oh the tales I could tell of raiding in Everquest! Oh the chainmail bikinies! Oh the princesses I have rescued! Oh, I do wonder sometimes, what would video games for women, by women look like? Would they be different? If so, how?

That's something that the new Vancouver-based gaming studio Silicon Sisters is tackling. The first female-owned and run video game studio in Canada, Silicon Sisters is committed to building games for women and girls - and building these games by women and girls. Formed by former Radical Entertainment executive producer Kristen Forbes and former Deep Fried Entertainment COO Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, the studio releases their very first game today, School 26, available for iOS.

The game is geared for tweens and teens and its storyline is built around the complicated social hierarchy of high school. You play the game as a young girl who's a newcomer to school. She comes from a nomadic family, something that has made it difficult for her to maintain long-term relations. As she enrolls in this, her 26th school, she strikes a bargain with her parents: if she can make friends, they'll stay put.

So the player of School 26 must help the character do just that: build friendships and navigate the sticky, awkward and sometimes awful moral dilemmas of school. These range from power struggles to peer pressure, romance, betrayal, alienation, acceptance - all real and relevant situations that girls face every day.

The gameplay involves the player selecting the appropriate emotional responses to certain scenarios and answering quizzes that provide insights into players' personalities. The emphasis here is on emphathy and networking.

What Message Does a Girl-Focused Game Give?

That's a very different set of goals and behaviors than most video games. There isn't swordplay here. No princesses to rescue. No alien invaders to vanquish. There isn't "action." There's "talk." The rewards aren't cash or weaponry. The skills honed in School 26 aren't the ability to time your jumps or dodge bullets or land killing blows.

As a long-time gamer, I have to say that this isn't the sort of gameplay that interests me. I like killing things. In games, of course.

But not everyone does -- girls and boys alike. There are plenty of casual games aimed at tweens that aren't action-oriented, and there are lots aimed at girls. But unlike many that target this market, there is no emphasis on shopping, fashion, or beauty.

Silicon Sisters plans to release more broadly-focused games soon, but says that all their games will all emphasize this sort of "social engineering" -- an emphasis on relationships and communication. These are legitimate skills for girls and women to develop, the studio argues, and something that will give them a competitive advantage in life.

Is social gaming - games played on social networks, like Facebook and MySpace - actually gaming? Millions of users have already given their tacit approval that there is indeed entertainment value in those games. But what puts hardcore gamers' skivvies in a knot is the idea that there has been total sacrifice of gameplay in exchange for filthy lucre - that these "games" have been so neutered that they only outwardly resemble gaming. And so the more important question is this: Are hardcore gamers simply demanding that all cars on the road be sports cars, or are they a bellwether of a shift in social gaming from click-click-click, to quality?

It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose "Social City" game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B.

Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game "currency" for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising.

"The business model for social games worked really well," said Mark Hendrickson of Big Fish, a Seattle-based gaming company, "because there were only a few companies who could harvest all the affiliate money and swamp anyone else's efforts by putting that money right back into the Facebook ad network. I really think they should have called it 'Facebook gaming.' Social gaming is only on the radar because it is a really, really cheap way to possibly make a whole lot of money, if implemented properly.

"As Facebook goes, so goes social gaming."

Tami Baribeau, the producer of Metaplace's Island Life game on Facebook, sees it very differently.

"Games go where people go," she said. "Social networks are clearly a hot platform right now because it's where people are spending time on the web."

She attributes the fiction that gameplay is compromised to hardcore gamer prejudice more than to any pandering to a lowest common denominator.

"The fact that social games are whittled down to their basic core mechanics and feedback loop mean that they're instantly understandable, casual, and the fun is easy to find. This is why they open up the market to so many people, and such a different demographic than traditional console/PC gaming. Traditional gamers don't like to admit (or simply don't realize) that games do not have to be massive, 3D, scripted, deep, and immersive experiences in order to be fun and engaging and monetizable. "

Alex Swanson, Project Lead at Playdom, also disagrees with the notion that good gameplay is stepped back in social gaming.

"Initially computers themselves were extremely complex and difficult to learn, so the platform self-selected for people that were tolerant of (or even attracted by) complexity," he said. "Since then computers have be come much more accessible, creating a gap in the market between the average computer user and the average 'gamer.'

"Part of the reason that games like these were never very successful prior to the existence of social networks is once again an issue of accessibility. These games are built around the idea that the user has a connected identity. Trying to ask users to build out their social graph as part of entering a game would create an insurmountable barrier to entry. Fortunately, Facebook has already convinced the players to do this by providing its own unique benefits."

If you play social games, you probably do not care about this argument. You play because it's fun. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's not for one group of gamers to tell another that they oughtn't love what they love.

"All I know," said one social gamer, " is I've met the nicest people playing Mafia Wars."

For another view of social gaming, see ReadWriteWeb's post on Armchair Revolutionary.

Zynga is quite similar to SGN, in that both companies mostly focus on games for social networks. Kongregate takes a different approach and makes its games available on its own site only. While this makes playing a game as simple as going to the Kongregate homepage, it also means that Kongregate doesn't have a built-in word-of-mouth marketing network to profit from.

With almost $40 million in money raised, Zynga and its VCs must be looking for a very high valuation for the company. Its main income sources are advertising and selling virtual goods to its players.

It's probably worth speculating that Zynga is going to use quite a lot of this venture money to branch out of the social networks games market and start developing for other platforms (such as cell phones) as well.