The California Academy of Sciences, just opened in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is a $488m marvel of architectural ambition, environmental awareness and the natural world.

Contained within the Renzo Piano design are an aquarium, a rain forest, a swamp, a planetarium and a living roof covering 2.5 acres, planted out with native Californian species.

I went to the first public event before the Academy's official opening - a launch party for Spore, the video game from the publisher Electronic Arts.

The setting was appropriate. Spore is a game about evolution, from small organisms to creatures that conquer the galaxy. Players have powerful tools at their disposal to develop their own unique species and the game has already featured in a National Geographic documentary about evolutionary biology.

It is therefore educational as well as entertaining in a ground-breaking way. Its rich graphics and user-friendly tools allow players to construct parts of the game themselves and enjoy an immersive experience.

Serious games - those not offering pure entertainment - are garnering more attention and while this example does not quite conform (it is still casual play, really) it points the way for this nascent category to grow.

In Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Business World, published by an FT subsidiary next month, authors David Edery and Ethan Mollick say only $150m was spent on games and training by business in 2006, of $46bn total spending on training.

"We suspect that this amount is so small because many educational and training games have developed a deservedly poor reputation," they say.

This goes back to the early days of video games, when educational versions were always the poor relations of those designed for entertainment.

These "crude one-off efforts" gave researchers weak evidence that games could aid the learning process in a significant way, according to the authors, setting back their development. Quiz-show formats were commonly used to convey dry instructional materials.

However, a recent report from Forrester Research, It's Time To Take Games Seriously, says serious games are finally poised to take off.

Forrester says people born between 1980 and 2000, have grown up playing video games and are becoming increasingly influential. Technology is also advancing rapidly.

The US military, which has been a leader in serious games, from the early days of flight simulation and the re-creation of battle conditions, introduced MyBase this year - a virtual environment for training and collaboration using haptic controls that exploit the sense of touch.

I tried something similar at this year's E3 video game show - the Novint Falcon controller. This uses motorised arms attached to a ball to create resistance and simulate experiences such as feeling materials, shaking hands or experiencing the forces exerted as you drive a virtual car round a corner.

Forrester believes controllers will have to be introduced that are easy for non-gamer employees to use, with the motion-sensing Nintendo Wii showing the way.

Improvements in graphics performance should also allow more engaging games to be created and such games should be capable of easily being personalised and customised to particular companies and individuals.

Again, there are examples in the more advanced entertainment side of the business that should cross over into serious games. Sony's LittleBIGPlanet, released this month, allows players to create levels of games for themselves in a very intuitive fashion.

Instead of Powerpoint slides, at E3, Sony's US president presented the console division's annual financial report as an animated game level of LittleBIGPlanet.

Games can also increase productivity and morale. Call centres could perhaps be improved by introduction of game elements such as scoring, ranking and awards.

Sony's Home virtual world, included in the PlayStation 3 from next month, gives users their own apartments, avatars, furniture and clothing, with special items being awarded for success in games. It's not hard to imagine similar virtual world concepts and rewards for working life.

Finally, serious games may become key tools for advocacy campaigns.

The British Red Cross has just launched its Traces of Hope website - "the first ever charity online Alternate Reality Game (ARG)".

The ARG is meant to raise awareness of how people are affected by conflict around the world and how the Red Cross is helping them.

The mix of genuine websites and an accurate simulation of the plight of refugees is powerful. It blurs boundaries and connects the serious gameplayer with harsh realities.

Changing the Game by David Edery and Ethan Mollick (FT Press, November 2008). It's Time To Take Games Seriously, TJ Keitt and Paul Jackson (Forrester Research, August 2008)