Jacqueline Urick has been playing videogames since she was a kid, starting out with an old-school Atari console and a Commodore 64 PC. Decades later, however, she’s still not quite at ease in the virtual world—a place she says women can feel like the odd players out.

“There’s certain things that happen in games that make it clear to you, as a woman, that you’re not the first person they thought of when they created this game,” said Urick. “It’s not the chain-mail bikini that bothers me. It’s the stuff that is awkward within the game, like when your character is walking and walks like a guy, or when your female character sits like a guy in a dress.”

While playing a BioWare adventure game called Dragon Age: Origins—a favorite of hers—a female character offered to save Urick’s character's life, but only on one condition. She also wanted to sleep with the virtual boyfriend of Urick's character and have his child.

The ultimatum from the Dragon Age minx didn't turn Urick off of the game entirely, but it did get her wondering: What if more women got involved in making games and rewriting what goes on in the virtual world? The 35-year-old Web developer and online marketing professional’s idea resonated with another female gaming enthusiast, Elizabeth Tupper, 31, and the two launched a startup called SieEnt.

The duo had already been helping to put Minnesota—the 1971 birthplace of The Oregon Trail game, incidentally—on the map for women who are in tech fields or want to be. Urick is the leader of the Girls in Tech chapter in Minneapolis, while Tupper runs the Twin Cities chapter of She’s Geeky.

No Joysticks for Damsels in Distress

SieEnt’s games will be for women who want to play videogames with intelligent and engaging storylines and graphics that empower them rather than treat them like damsels in distress or guys in drag, Urick said.

With a growing team of 11 contract writers and developers around the country, SieEnt is creating a sci-fi murder-mystery videogame that will feature role-playing and will be released episode by episode. The target release date is the second quarter of 2012, and the goal is to first release a PC-based game and then subsequently release versions for the Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems, as well as for Xbox Live.

By creating games that are welcoming to and created by women, these entrepreneurs are tapping into a market that came to light thanks to Zynga, the creator of social-networking games like FarmVille, which was just valued at as much as $20 billion as it filed for an IPO. Zynga made headlines when it declared its core gamer was a 40-year-old woman and that most of its players were females, ages 25 to 44. The Entertainment Software Association said 42 percent of video and online gamers in the United States in 2010 were female, up from 38 percent in 2006.

Those numbers are no surprise to Ben Noel, executive director of Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, which offers a master's program in game development at University of Central Florida in Orlando. He says female gamers have actually been playing videogames for years, especially Pogo and Yahoo games, but the Facebook games brought female players into the light.

“Game makers and publishers want to make money, so it is not as if the gender was ignored. It’s more that the sexy games over the past 20 years were sports game, shooters, GTA [Grand Theft Auto], World of Warcraft

—games that show well in marketing,” Noel said. “Those games are definitely more male-gender focused.”

The male influence may also have to do with who is making the games. A 2005 demographic survey by the International Game Developers Association found that only 11.5 percent of the respondents were female, a number that gibes with FIEA’s enrollment statistics for its gaming program

—or at least it did until last year, when the percentage of women climbed to 20 percent, Noel said.