I just came across this article about the PS2:

=Has the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond?

According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King.

So where's the connection to Sony? According to Toward Freedom, during the 2000 launch of the PS2, the electronics giant was having trouble meeting consumer demand. To pump out more units, Sony required a significant increase in the production of electric capacitors, which are primarily made with tantalum. This helped drive the world price of the powder from $49/pound to a whopping $275/pound, resulting in the frenzied scouring of the Congolese hills known for being ripe with coltan.

Sony has since sworn off using tantalum acquired from the Congo, claiming that current builds of the PS2, PSP and PS3 consoles are sourced from a variety of mines in several different countries.

But according to researcher David Barouski, they're hardly off the hook.

"SONY's PlayStation 2 launch...was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999," he explained. "SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don't care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan."

Currently, the Playstation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all-time, having sold through over 140 million units. =

Source

well that's pretty fucked.

OLD. But still fucked up

OLD. But fucking awesome. SONY FTW.

LOL. Is it bad that I enjoy playing mah video games at the probable expense of 12 year old coltan miners in Africa?

Eh, damn niggers

No, actually it makes you a good person. What would those poor kids do without mining? Drugs...that's what.

they should make a ps3 game like metal gear solid or medal of honor where you have to liberate the congolese coltan miners

My motherboard has copper heatsinks treated in African children's blood. They run cooler that way.

the difference between my console and niggers, is that..


.. my console actually WORKS

on a second thought; more things are made or mined for by 3rd world children than we'd imagine.

precisely why the PS2 (or any other console) gets the negative exposure is no surprise, as theres plenty of dumbfuck assholes out there who will do anything to prevent the release of any yet-to-come GTA (or any violent) title -- as of course, it's the default blame for everything, spanning from some dipshit robbing a shoe store, to 9/11.

Uh, I guess this is a bad time to show off my coltan-plated ps3?

*ObZ

No, not at all.

omg ps3-plated coltan.

hahahahaa nearly every post in this thread made me laugh

+1 all around!

*puuuurs with satisfaction*

Lots of modern technology is built using materials mined, grown, harvested, or otherwise obtained via third-world shitholes. Plastics all come from oil. You want to take a guess how many millions of people have died over oil in the last couple decades? Large chunks of electricity generation all over the world happen because of coal, which is mined by people living and working in hazardous, squalid conditions. Gold, silver, diamonds, semiprecious materials used in doping semiconductors, etc. largely come from unstable potions of the world like Africa and Southeast Asia, and in some places sweatshop labor assembles the components as well.

This isn't news. That doesn't make it right, but it still isn't news. Singling out Sony because we all love to hate them is a great wanking exercise, but there are bigger problems afoot in the grand scheme of things.

Fact.

It's true, there isn't much point in singling out Sony, unless you could prove them to be a significantly bigger offender than competitors. It's a problem that just happens to include games consoles. The root of the situation doesn't have anything to do with gaming at all.

The rest of this post are just my thoughts about this topic in general. I don't know much about all this mining and it's impact, but every time our scientists discover some significant "new" technology, I think all we'd do is just expand production/ ie: make the situation even worse than before, due to new technological advancements, that we as a culture generally tend to feel entitled to. So I see it getting worse before it gets better. And I'm not very malevolent or hateful (for the lulz) like some totseans. I think a childhood spent in horribly unsafe mines would kind of suck. I don't really agree with making kids work, unless the family like needs it to survive, because they are such blank slates. And even then, I don't think it's good to saddle a child with his/her parent's troubles so early in life, since no one really asks to be born. But that's idealistic of me. I don't really think people should be born only to die in a mine (or complications from one) because their country is too backwards, and powerful corporations at our side of the situation can see the ample value gained in exploiting them.

Though agreed I'd rather die buried alive in a mine than get maimed by a land-mine.

MINE doesn't... in other news i just found out why my ps3 is breaking all the time

Coltan-plated LAND MINES.

They harvest land mines for coltan and......BOOM NIGGA.