Gandhi Jayanti and Games: What the Numbers Say About Violence in Games and Why It Matters in India

Today is Gandhi Jayanti, the 157th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth in 1869. Since June 2007, when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution backed by more than 140 countries, October 2 has also been the International Day of Non-Violence. It is a fair day to ask a question the games industry hears often, and hears more in India than almost anywhere: do violent games make players violent? Here is what the numbers say, and where they run out.

Start with how big the question is in India. The India State of Play report, written by Naavik with data from Sensor Tower and AppsFlyer and published by MIXI Global Investments in July 2026, counts more than 600 million active mobile gamers and 7.95 billion game installs in 2025. That is roughly 13 installs per gamer, though installs are not unique players. Mobile game revenue was about $1.1 billion in 2025 and is forecast at $1.5 billion in 2026, up 14.6%. Shooters lead in-app purchase revenue, and BGMI alone has passed 260 million downloads since 2021. Violence in games is not a niche issue here.

Now the research. In 2019, Andrew Przybylski of the University of Oxford and Netta Weinstein of Cardiff University published a study in Royal Society Open Science that followed about 1,000 British 14- and 15-year-olds and their parents. Aggression was reported by both the teenagers and their parents, and the study found no link between playing violent games and aggressive behaviour. It was also a registered report, which means the analysis plan was fixed before the data came in, making it harder to go fishing for a result.

The American Psychological Association's 2020 resolution is more careful than most headlines suggest. It says there is insufficient scientific evidence to link violent video games to violence itself, but it does describe a small but reliable link between violent games and mild aggressive acts such as yelling and pushing. The APA's own president pointed to a history of violence as a major predictor of future violence and called violence a complex social problem with many causes. So the honest summary is not that games have no effect on anything. It is that no good evidence ties them to real-world violence, and a small effect on minor aggression is not the same thing.

Gandhi's own record gives a useful sense of scale for what organised non-violence takes. The 1930 Salt March covered about 240 miles, or 386 kilometres, in 24 days, which works out to roughly 10 miles a day. It began with several dozen followers at the Sabarmati ashram and drew tens of thousands of people by the time it reached the sea at Dandi. More than 60,000 people were detained during the wider campaign. Non-violence there was a discipline planned in detail, not an absence of conflict.

The best example of how a story about violence in games can outrun the facts has Gandhi in it too. The "Nuclear Gandhi" claim says a bug in the first Civilization made Gandhi's aggression overflow from 1 to 255 once his nation turned democratic, so he spammed nuclear weapons. Sid Meier confirmed in his 2020 memoir that this bug would have been impossible, and designer Brian Reynolds had already called it apocryphal. The legend appears to have started in 2012 when a TV Tropes user added it without evidence, and big outlets were repeating it by 2014. The one real nuclear Gandhi is in Civilization V in 2010, where designers deliberately set his nuke values to 12 on a 1 to 12 scale as a joke. It took until 2020 for the creator of the series to say the original never happened.

What should studios take from this? First, be honest about the limits. Most of this research comes from Western samples, relies on self-reported behaviour, and covers short periods. We did not find a long-term study of Indian teenagers and violent mobile games, so for India the evidence is thin, not settled. Second, the design choices that regulators are now looking at are often not about violence at all: spending pressure on young players, chat moderation, and how a game rewards time spent. A shooter with strong moderation and spend limits and a puzzle game with aggressive monetisation can carry very different risks.

At Anahata Interactive we mostly make puzzle, idle and casual games, so this is a debate we watch rather than one we are in the middle of. But Gandhi Jayanti is a good reminder that a game is a set of choices about what to reward, and those choices are ours.