Conventional wisdom has it that videogames are only good for rotting our minds and compelling us to go all postal if someone gives us a dirty look.

At least one organization has taken a different view of the popular medium: the U.S. military has started using PlayStation 2 consoles to train soldiers in the art of controlling unmanned robotic vehicles. In Alabama for a presentation to the Decatur Rotary Club, Col. Edward M. Ward told the audience how he brought 200 PS2s to Iraq to sharpen his men’s hand-eye-coordination for controlling the bots in their mission to locate and detonate explosive devices.

"I can get more robots," Ward said at a Decatur Rotary Club meeting Monday. "I'd rather a $120,000 robot get blown up than someone's son or daughter."

As Rotary members used remote control devices to put two such robots through their paces, Ward, based at Redstone Arsenal, explained that the military began taking its robotics programs seriously after it deployed troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The impetus, he said, was the improvised explosive devices that claimed the lives of so many U.S. soldiers. See, it’s all very clear now: videogames don’t cause kids to kill, rather, they teach them to operate killer robots.