A brutal conflict is ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And the shocking news is that the Playstation 2 - the best-selling video game console of all-time with over 140 million units sold - is the cause, according to a Yahoo! Games report.

This is because in order to manufacture the Playstation 2, a rare metal found in Congo called coltan is needed.

After processing, the unrefined metallic ore coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices that include the game consoles.

So financially lucrative is the trade of coltan - hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal is being traded - that Rwandan military groups and western mining companies are forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

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

Really?

Well, according to researcher David Barouski, Sony's claims are highly doubted.

"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."

So the next time you turn on your videogame console, remember the words of Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King, "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."