Anne Laurent writes regularly on virtual worlds on her blog, The Agile Mind

What goes around comes around.

Nowhere is this better illustrated today than in the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. military and the computer and video gaming industry. You'll find a terrific illustration of it in a column in one of my favorite reads, Popular Mechanics.

On May 29, in his biweekly column, Senior Technology Editor Glenn Derene crafts a capsule history of the way early games stole their joystick and pistol interfaces from the Defense Department and how DoD now is stealing back gaming controllers to operate unmanned vehicles and weapons systems.

Full disclosure: I am a Popular Mechanics geek and a big fan of Derene, who has become something of a video star for his many podcasts on the magazine's Web site. I am keen on the magazine because I swoon over accessible explanations and graphics and PM overflows with them.

This column finds Derene using joysticks to train a Humvee gun on a hapless visitor to Navy Fleet Week exhibits in New York. The weapon is the Lightweight Stabilized M240 Weapon System, a rooftop mounted monster controlled entirely from within the vehicle. Derene chats with Mark Bigham, business development director for Raytheon Tactical Intelligence Systems. Raytheon uses Xbox controllers to drive its UAVs.

Bigham's take on the military's reliance on gamers is telling: "The gaming industry is such a huge market," he said. "The investment in R&D that they're going to spend on human factors is going to dwarf even what the Department of Defense will spend." In other words, Defense is content to let gamers develop the next generation of controls for its tanks, planes, ships and who knows what other weapons.

Makes sense, since today's game players will be tomorrow's warfighters. Might as well begin their training early and for free, as Derene points out. And now, he notes, Raytheon is appropriating Nintendo's research and development for the Wii, testing its controller for use in simulators requiring physical movement.