''Sometimes there's humans that you are killing, sometimes there's other orcs, there's like ogres. There's things called drain-eyes that you are killing,'' Ms Andrews said.

Once it was mostly boys who committed violent acts on orcs, but lately the ''gender gap'' among gamers has been closing. In the past seven years, the proportion of female gamers has risen from 38 per cent to 47 per cent, a 2011 Bond University report, commissioned by the Games and Entertainment Association, found.

Soon there will be as many female gamers as males, Dr Jeffrey Brand, an associate professor at Bond University who led the study, says. ''We saw girls increasingly get into gaming in the late 1990s and of course these girls are now women and many of these women have children.''

Across both sexes, gamers - defined by researchers as regular players of video games on any machine - are now more likely to be in their 30s, according to Dr Brand and separate analysis by market forecaster IBISWorld.

A popular theory is that more women are playing video games because the games have become more ''family friendly'', but Dr Brand said his survey revealed no great difference between male and female tastes.