In the past couple of years online games have really started to diversify into wider demographics.
In particular, many developers are now creating them especially for young girls.
New genres such as dress-up, and cooking games are seeing a real explosion at the moment as more and more girls are spending time not only playing online, but also sharing those games via social media.
In fact, social sites such as Facebook and Bebo are one of the main reasons for this rapid growth in "games for girls" but it is also largely due to the fact that developers now see this as a viable demographic to develop for and are spending more time creating games to meet the needs of this group.
Traditionally video games have been aimed at young males.
With typical genres including shooting, fighting and sports, console and computer games have always been largely aimed at male players.
Girls (in general) tend to be less interested in the violent and highly competitive genres traditionally aimed at boys, but are very keen to join in when offered more creative games and puzzles.
The 2 sub-genres for which I've noticed a real spike in traffic recently (on my own games sites) have been so called dress-up, and cooking games.
While the definitions are not set in stone, "dress up" typically involves choosing and positioning different items of clothing (or makeup, accessories etc.
) on a character, while the cooking genre is more loosely defined as any game involving cooking (but typically involves matching specific ingredients to a recipe to fulfill customer orders).
Of course females have always played videogames, and certain genres such as word puzzles always attract a large number of female players, but it's only recently that young females have been catered for with genres specifically designed for them.
As online videogames continue to grow at breakneck speed I suspect that we will see more and more of these niche genres popping up over time.