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The stereotypical gamer is male, in his teens or early twenties, devotedly gaming from his parents' basement. The actual make-up of the gaming population, however, is strikingly different. The average gamer is 34. And 40% of all players are women over the age of 18 - the industry's fastest growing demographic.

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.

There is a question being bandied about by people in the game industry. It effects something you do, or, if you don't, your friend, roommate, wife or fencing opponent does. Social gaming.

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?

Casual gaming on the web must look like quite an attractive market to VCs right now. Jeff Bezos already invested in two casual gaming companies this year, Kongregate and SGN, after SGN had already raised a $15 million Series A round in January. Now, Mark Pincus' Zynga, another online gaming site, announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. Zynga also announced the acquisition of YooVille, a virtual world application for Facebook.