  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.
