Pierre-Olivier Montiglio, Maxime Fraser Franco , Francesca Santostefano

Behavior shapes population and community dynamics through feedbacks with habitat configuration and interaction networks. Work on this interplay includes longitudinal surveys, experiments, and models. Multiplayer online videogames foster real-time interactions among lots of players in virtual spaces. Data from these games could complement theoretical and empirical work but research on them is only emerging now. We highlight how these games allow us to track individual movement, decisions, interactions, and performance in a tractable environment. We use our work on the game Dead by Daylight as an example to show that social and predator-prey interactions can generate complex eco-evolutionary dynamics favoring an array of behavioral traits we often study in nature. These games can foster progress in eco-evolutionary and behavioral research.