Just the other week there, I noticed we were having the old "girls in gaming" debate again. But d'you know what I say? I say: keep girls out of gaming.

Can you feel it pumping on your stereo? 

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Because it's time, chums, to face up to a few hard facts. Video games have been around for over two decades now.

(In fact, home gaming as we know it is 22 this Christmas, older than many of you probably are yourselves.)

If girls were going to get into it, they'd have done it by now, and all the Barbie games in the world won't change that. So why must we continually waste time trying to attract people who don't care and aren't ever going to be very interested? Why not just give up?

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There are some things in the world which, by and large, boys are simply always going to be more interested in than girls, and vice versa.

Only boys like getting into fights and having wars. Only boys could happily spend their whole lives watching sport on TV. Only boys ever become sad Red Dwarf/Star Trek/Babylon 5 obsessives. (Or almost any kind of obsessives.)

And only boys, at heart, think that playing games is anything other than a rather silly way to spend your time.

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In practically every other sporting or competitive pastime in the world, boys have an advantage over girls. Boys run faster, jump higher and throw further, because they're physically stronger.

But in video games, the playing field is level. There's absolutely no physical or technical reason why girls couldn't be every bit as good at games as boys are.

So why aren't they? The answer is, because they don't want to be. They just don't really care.

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In the old days, the argument ran that girls weren't interested because games were about macho things like shooting aliens and punching people in the face.

But even now that games are often more complex, more involved, more story-led and have far more emotionally-detailed characters to play (supposedly the kind of stuff girls like), there's no real evidence that they're significantly more interested than they ever were.

Let's get used to it, chums - it's just not going to happen. Sad, but true.

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Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Just think of all the famous girls who know lots about video games and appear regularly in magazines and on telly talking about them.

Why, there's... um...

And... er...

Oh, but don't forget... nope...

It's not much to show for 22 years, is it? Not even one decently well-known female gaming personality.

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So let's stop pretending. There's nothing wrong with only boys really being interested in games, just like there's nothing wrong with only girls really being interested in careers as ballet dancers or nurses.