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If anyone here plays board games regularly, what's your opinion on kingmaking? I'm aware there are a range of opinions on this, and this is a point of contention for many players out there.
Kingmaking, for the uninitiated, is basically a behaviour players can engage in during board games where after you fall behind the other players to the extent that you're effectively out of the game, you can throw the game in favour of the player you want to win. This is usually based on in-game grudges (someone absolutely screwed you over, so you'd rather they not win) and it regularly rears its head in social board games, one of the most common games I see it in being Settlers of Catan.
Personally, I am not against kingmaking. I think kingmaking, teaming, and all other related behaviours are inherent in social board games with more than two players and can't really be avoided (nor should it). A big part of any social game is about judging your adversaries' personalities and playing the players accordingly, and if you engage in aggressive behaviour early on and make enemies, there's clearly a risk that comes with it. You can't make it difficult for a player to win then expect them not to take their revenge. Additionally, strategically employing kingmaking and threats thereof can set a meta-rule for future games - if you screw me, I'll screw you back - which might make a player think twice about taking their chances to screw you in the future. The humans you're playing with are part of the game, and the relational dynamics are what make a lot of social games interesting in the first place.
It goes without saying that if the player still has a good chance of winning kingmaking would probably be a poor strategy, but I don't inherently have a problem with pursuing revenge in and of itself.
I'm generally of the opinion that games, and players within games, should almost always be as un-meta as possible. Each player should act according to the best strategy they can deduce that maximizes their own probability of winning. In some cases, you might choose strategies that you find more fun even if they have a lower probability of winning, but even then I consider that to be a flaw in the game: the best strategies ought to be the most fun. Or there might be actions which are technically legal in the rules but are unsportsmanlike, so it's probably fine to play nicely in that way (though again, this is a flaw in the game design).
Your relationships to other players shouldn't matter, the actual human person you're playing against should barely matter except in-so-far as it allows you insight into their tendencies and biases and intelligence that helps you predict their behavior. At least with regards to the actual decisions you make within the game, obviously you can like talk to them outside of the game while the game is happening. But you shouldn't modulate your in-game behavior based on out of game information, because the actual best strategy in the game doesn't depend on out of game stuff.
On the other hand, I also find over-optimizing out of game to be kind of unfun and cringe. The best example would be people studying chess strategies and memorizing positions and moves and stuff. Because then you're not getting better by playing the game, you're just studying for an interactive exam. The fun part of the game is deducing strategies and figuring stuff out and encountering new situations for yourself, not memorizing strategies that someone smarter than you figured out.
When you're playing the game, you should be playing the game properly. And when you're not playing the game, you should not be playing the game. Kingmaking is not playing the game properly, because it strictly reduces your position in the game, and provides no in-game benefit. The only purpose it has is meta, and thus is bad.
I do not consider repeated game strategy to be "out of game". It's a basic element of game theory - ever heard of repeated prisoner's dilemma?
I agree that kingmaking for someone just because they're your friend is not fun for anyone else at the table. Kingmaking for game theory purposes, especially if warned beforehand, is valid strategy. Introducing strategic spite into the game makes the table rethink how they build alliances and gives players more agency.
It's "out of game" in that it is strategizing one level up. It's not playing the current instance as the game, but instead the full set. If that's the level you want to analyze, fine, but I think it's fair to say it is tainting single-game strategy with meta strategy.
I also sign on to @MathWizard's game ethics here and have always had the feeling that caching chess opening strategy is distasteful - sort of against the spirit of the game - yes.. even in the face of hundreds of years of the top players doing just that.
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