1 Pharmacotic Wargames: Military Play as Ritual Sacrifice Aggie Hirst King’s College London Aggie.hirst@kcl.ac.uk Larry N. George California State University Long Beach Larry George <larry.george@csulb.edu> Published Security Dialogue 31 st January 2024 Abstract This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle warfighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that these processes function according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex)warfighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex)warfighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex)warfighters in the twenty-first century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of warfighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus. Introduction ‘It’s kind of weird and full circle. Gaming brought you into this world and it will take you out’ (Interview A). Recent scholarship within and beyond critical security studies (CSS) has explored how the bodies and lives of warfighters are made available for war, used as instruments of state violence, and then, in a recurring ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ (MacLeish 2020), either rehabilitated back into service or ejected into conditions of debilitation. This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war