Someone who wins Mafia may well be a terrible person, because the skills involved in winning Mafia and being a terrible person are very similar. But winning Mafia doesn't *make* you a terrible person, because it's not a real situation, and simulated treachery is what everyone signed on for. If you forget that and write a callout post about how this person was terrible and killed everyone in Mafia and made the world a worse place, you're wrong and you're making Mafia a worse place.
In Mafia, your role is decided at the beginning and the entire purpose of the game is for the town to sniff out who are scum.
This is more like, you are playing Mafia IRL, you tell you friend “hey I gotta pee really bad, can you make sure nobody looks at my cards” and give them the custody of your cards, and the instant you are around a corner the friend turns the cards over and shows your scum alignment to everybody and you come back to a lynch vote on you. Except the game is something you’ve been putting years of work into.
A closer analogy would be a variant of Mafia in which each player gets to choose their role, rather than having it assigned randomly. Some would choose to be bad guys, some would choose to be good guys, and either could potentially be a fun and entertaining choice- and neither would be a moral failing.
Choosing to be a bad guy in a game is not a moral failing.
Betraying someone is a moral failing.
Telling someone “don’t worry, we’re on the same team” when you aren’t isn’t a moral failing necessarily, when what you’re doing is just having them let you in the airlock so you can kill them an end the round or whatever. Because the only actual trust placed in you was incredibly minor, minor enough that the rules of the game outweigh it. When you say “we’re on the same team” in order to get access to be able to undo years of work by them, that’s a moral failing. You’re a bad person if you do that.
Betrayal is when you tell someone “Give me power over you, so I can use it to help you instead of harm you,” and they give you power, and you use it to harm them. It is exploiting trust placed in you by another human being. Someone choosing to play Executive Order on the player after them in turn order is making a play in a game, and if it turns out that player was a Cylon and they use the XO to reveal and then immediately take a full turn, it turns out that was a bad play. Someone who puts you in charge of the finances of a massive guild in a game where money has explicit real-world value is placing trust in you as a human being, and if you take it all and give it to the people who feel and express the most contempt, what you are doing is a betrayal.
Betrayal is wrong, no matter how much contempt you feel for the betrayed.
But contempt for the betrayed gives Something Awful more power, always.
I should start by saying – I don’t play EVE Online, and don’t know all that much about it, despite its cropping up every so often in the press.
Which means I don’t know exactly what the game experience is supposed to be, what it is that the players are going for. Presumably it differs somewhat from player to player, as for every game, which makes things more complicated.
I gather that part of the fantasy, the game-as-it-is-meant-to-be-played, is Real Politics and Real Intrigue where player agency actually matters greatly. “If you decide to change your allegiance from Faction X to Faction Y, that can make a real difference in what the game world looks like! If you decide to give another player or a faction power over you, that has real benefits – and real dangers!” To the extent that this is what EVE is supposed to be, what the players signed up for, then the betrayal at issue is basically a larger-scale and more dramatic version of a cool Mafia victory.
If some of the players signed up for Intrigue: the MMO, and some of them signed up for Fun Friendly Nation-Building Times in Space, then…well, then the practical ethics get dicey, and of course this is very likely what actually transpired. I feel very bad for those players who contributed to the buildup of Circle of Two, not seriously thinking about possibilities like this.
It is probably at least somewhat relevant, in dishing out our moral judgment, that everything being done here was done according to the rules of the activity (assuming that I correctly understand the scenario). There was no hacking, no equivalent of “let me look at your cards while you’re out of the room” – all the power being (ab)used by this guy was in-game power explicitly given to him by other players as part of the game.
Serious question, because I think I may be missing something: do you have any concrete reason to think that SA culture politics led to this happening, beyond “the SA faction was one of the entities that benefited from the collapse of Circle of Two?” SA can certainly have destructive influence in lots of ways, but it’s also true that it’s often just one of the larger and better-organized populations in a given environment.