The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how strategic decisions coevolve with the environment has so far mostly been overlooked. Here, we consider a game selection model where not only the strategies but also the game can change over time following evolutionary principles. Our results show that coevolutionary dynamics of games and strategies can induce novel collective phenomena, fostering the emergence of cooperative environments. When the model is taken on structured populations the architecture of the interaction network can significantly amplify pro-social behavior, with a critical role played by network heterogeneity and the presence of clustered groups of similar players, distinctive features observed in real-world populations. By unveiling the link between the evolution of strategies and games for different structured populations, our model sheds new light on the origin of social dilemmas ubiquitously observed in real-world social systems.

翻译：竞争环境中集体合作的出现是生物学、经济学和社会系统中一个众所周知的现象。尽管大多数演化博弈模型关注固定博弈中策略的演化，但战略决策如何与环境协同演化的问题迄今大多被忽视。本文提出一个博弈选择模型，其中不仅策略会随时间演化，博弈本身也遵循演化原则发生变化。我们的研究结果表明，博弈与策略的协同演化动力学能够诱发新的集体现象，促进合作环境的涌现。当模型应用于结构化群体时，交互网络的结构可以显著增强亲社会行为，其中网络异质性和相似玩家聚集群的存在起到关键作用——这些正是现实世界群体中观察到的典型特征。通过揭示不同结构化群体中策略演化与博弈演化的内在联系，我们的模型为理解现实社会系统中普遍存在的社会困境起源提供了新的视角。