It’s amazing how the demands of the consumers lead to the death and destruction of others. Who knew that the toy you bought your kids for Christmas would lead to conflict in war ravaged Africa? The metal used in components found in many of the electronic devices that we use everyday is mined in Congo and when PlayStation 2 hit the market demand pushed the price of the metal up and lead to the involvement of Rwandan military groups who seized the mines and plundered them for their own gain:

After it is refined, coltan becomes a bluish-gray powder called tantalum, which is defined as a transition metal. For the most part, tantalum has one significant use: to satisfy the West’s insatiable appetite for personal technology. Tantalum is used to make cell phones, laptops and other electronics made, for example, by SONY, a multi-billion dollar multinational based in Japan that manufactures the iconic PlayStation, a video game console. And while allegations of plundering coltan from a nation in desperate need of revenue seem bad enough, the UN also discovered that Rwandan troops and rebels were using prisoners-of-war and children to mine for the “black gold.”
[…]
Like today’s demand for oil, this fever puts tremendous stress on tantalum’s supply chain. From the beginning of 1999 to the beginning of 2001, the world price of tantalum went from US $49.00 a pound to $275.00 a pound. At the same time, the demand and price of coltan also began skyrocketing; coltan is needed to make tantalum.
By 1999, the Rwandan army and several closely linked militias had swarmed over the hills of eastern DRC and took many coltan mines by force, said the UN. The Rwandan army that year would eventually make at least $250 million by selling DRC coltan with the help of mining companies and metal brokers. The estimates of the war’s dead range from hundreds of thousands to several million. A couple million Congolese are believed to have been displaced.

(via)
All so that we can play video games. Amazing! I’m feeling guilty about this since we have a PlayStation 2, though we didn’t buy ours until a few years after it was released (and yes, if I knew, I wouldn’t have bought it).