While video gaming has grown immensely as an industry over the last decade, with growing numbers of gamers around the globe, including women, gaming continues to be a very gendered practice. The apparent gender divide in video gaming has caught the attention of both the gaming industry and educators, generating considerable discussion and conflicting perspectives on its causes and consequences, as well as strategies to address the gender gap. The gaming industry obviously has a vested interest (profit) in attracting more gamers, and women have seemed a likely market for quite some time. Already women are gaming in growing numbers but they tend not to play the more complex, revenue-generating "hard-core" games such as first-person shooters and fantasy games in as many numbers as do men. Women tend to play more "casual" games such as Tetris and Solitaire, or games like The Sims. The authors' goal in this paper is to point out some problems with popular assumptions about women as gamers, and to suggest an alternative way of understanding their orientations towards gaming. She also suggests some implications of this perspective for educators who are interested in designing games for learning.