If anyone cared to go through Water Cooler Games websites or take a look at Persuasive Games they can find a whole boatload of "serious" games to cite.
One of the more interesting ones is by Unicef; it's in Swahili (the only game on the web IN Swahili!) designed to increase knowledge about HIV and AIDS in Africia. It can be found
here.
Another really rad game to bring up would be
Guru Meditation by Ian Bogost. It's a homebrew being designed on the VCS to use the Joyboard and allow the user to open their inner Chakra via sitting perfectly still and meditating.
And the writer definately needs to hit the Wiki page for these sorts of games (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game) to use as a launch pad. Lots of additional examples are to be found there. Another good place is to hit
Kotaku and search for the tag "serious games". Quite a few nice side stories there.
I'm hoping you're following up with this Apollo. There are dozens, and dozens of places you can get info about these sorts of games. Hopefully the writer is being exposed to some of the major sources to keep the forthcoming article grounded in reality as much as possible