I was at a party the other day along with "the cream of the UK's computer game developers". Games are big business these days - over £1bn and growing quickly - and so, unsurprisingly, they seemed to be in a good mood.

I should explain that, while Sony and Microsoft make the boxes, and publishers like Eidos publish the games, the developers are the boys who have to stay up all night writing the things. You'll have noticed I'm saying: guys, boys etc, because, at this party for the "cream of the UK's game developers", I could count exactly two women. And one of those was the PR who organised it. It's entirely possible that there were some very thin women standing behind pillars somewhere, but the point stands that the cream of the UK's game developers doesn't yet include women.

This is sad. And not just for women trying to break into the games industry. It's bad for the games industry itself. While gaming is hugely popular (in the US, it's a bigger business than films), it wants, and needs, to be bigger. And the way to do that is to break out of its core demographic into pastures new. And that core demographic is boys aged 16-30. With the emphasis on boys.

In other words, the target audience for most games is a younger version of the people at the party, who were for the most part men in their late 30s.

There were a few older guys, but they were mostly the business brains who came in from outside when the founders discovered they didn't know how to negotiate a loan. But those founders, the cream, were all of an age that makes it plain that 20 years ago they were huddled over either a Sinclair Spectrum or a BBC Micro, or possibly a Vic-20, playing Defender, or Chucky Egg, or Manic Miner. And when they'd finished playing, they decided to try and do it for themselves.

And while they were hogging the TV, their sisters were outside playing real games and developing things like social skills. Without meaning to, yet without even trying, they created a boys-only world of guns, wizards and fast cars, in which the only women are huge of bust and short of clothes.

Nobody wants this. The games industry would love to have more women, not least because they want to develop more games that will appeal to older, younger or just more female demographics than their current core audience. Plus they'd have someone other than boys to talk to at parties.