  Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of
competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the
past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might
contribute to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of these systems.
During the last three years one intuitive model, commonly referred to as the
Minority Game, has attracted broad attention. Powerful yet simple, the minority
game has produced encouraging results which can explain the temporal behaviour
of competitive systems. Here we switch the interest to phenomena due to a
distribution of the individuals in space. For analyzing these effects we modify
the Minority Game and the Local Minority Game is introduced. We study the
system both numerically and analytically, using the customary techniques
already developped for the ordinary Minority Game.
