So in FFA, betrayals happen. That's part of the game, I'm not complaining about it. But what does get me is when someone betrays you, then claims in later chat that you actually betrayed them. This recently happened over private chat twice in a game, from two different players. They're allied, so maybe it's some kind of psychological strategy they've discussed? But I've also seen it in other games.

Any ideas what's going on here? Do people actually use this as a psychological strategy? If so... does it work on anyone? It seems like they're banking on me not being able to form short-term memories or something. Or is the answer that they can't actually form short-term memories themselves? I'm just at a loss here.

I'd assume they're trying to manipulate the other players, rather than you. If others knew of their treachery than they'd be more at risk for the other players to betray them sooner, or to not engage in a treaty to begin with.

In public chat, sure. But this has happened in private chat.

Guilt? And a weird way to cope with it? :)

I've had the same thing happen to me, some people have a way of reinventing the world.

There is a psychological phenomena called Reduction of Dissonance. That's what causes smokers to disbelieve the evidence on the harms of smoking: the brain can't reconcile doing something that is self-harmful, so it convinces itself otherwise. Maybe the same thing in a mroe trivial context is going on here?

You can probably tell I'm not a psychologist, I know just enough to be dangerous :-)

I've had a guy ask me for a truce six or seven turns after we had discussed and accepted a truce, all in private chat..
ofc' I play primarily MD games, I can't imagine it being so common in RT games..

Differing veiws on what a 'truce' involves?

If someone started stacking troops on my border i would take that as a breach of the truce. They might not.

Threatening moves of any kind could be a breach....

You could both have attacked the same territory...

People have a habbit of only noticing or remembering certain things.
You can see this most in road accident disputes. Often both sides tell a completely different story, both of wich are untrue. You then have to sort through the stories and remove the obvious problems before you can actually see who is in the right.

Or in MD, the turns have been so long you just forget with whom you had what agreements. My biggest problem, especially if there are multiple games on the same map which was happening often.

I once had a truce with a person who attacked me with all his might the moment I mentioned "we might have to end this in the future", because he was "scared that it wasn't going to be a vote to end" and that it's my fault for mentioning it. In the next game we played he tried to regain my trust and was being completely creepy by asking if we could move all our armies together and thrust into each other "just for fun". (meaning I'd have to leave my bonuses unattended). He was the bigger of players, so he would win if he wanted to, but suggested a vote to end. He was making me move my armies over half of the map and eventually he did do the vote to end. Really amazing.