Video games pose persistent challenges for cultural heritage institutions due to their technical complexity, legal constraints, and rapidly changing platforms. Traditional preservation approaches that prioritize long-term playability often conflict with the material, social, and experiential realities of games as cultural objects (Anderson et al. 2013; Olgado 2019). In response, recent work has emphasized documentation, contextualization, and narrative description as viable and complementary approaches to technical preservation, particularly for independent and culturally situated games (Cross et al. 2015; Nylund 2018). Archive Laro, a publicly accessible Philippine Video Game Archive available at archivelaro.com, positions itself within this documentary and narrative turn by proposing a modular archival model that foregrounds developer voices, cultural context, and ethical participation.

Rather than hosting or emulating games, Archive Laro collects descriptive metadata, development histories, and cultural annotations submitted directly by developers through a structured survey instrument. The project focuses on games created by Filipino or Filipino-identifying individuals, groups, or studios that contain identifiable Filipino elements, whether through narrative themes, language use, visual environments, historical references, or implied cultural frameworks. This distinction responds to ongoing debates in Philippine game studies regarding what constitutes a Filipino video game, where authorship alone is insufficient without cultural articulation or representation (Espiritu 2023). Developers are therefore asked to identify and describe these elements themselves, allowing cultural meaning to emerge from creator intent rather than external classification.

To illustrate how this works in practice, two entries from the current corpus demonstrate the range of documentation the archive captures. Taguan (Murushii Studios 2025), a released psychological horror game, embeds Filipino cultural identity through Baybayin script in its logo, barangay settings, references to chismosas (gossipers) and local cuisine, and a narrative drawn from everyday economic precarity. The developer's submission describes these choices as deliberate decisions to make players feel "both nostalgic and unsettled," linking horror atmosphere to lived cultural experience. Balikaw (8Log Studios 2025), an indie horror game rooted in Filipino pamahiin (superstitions), structures its core gameplay around traditional superstitions: covering food, closing windows at dark, cleaning religious statues, and lighting candles at the altar. Each mechanic is annotated in the archive with the developer's own explanation of its folkloric basis. These entries demonstrate how narrative metadata can capture not only what cultural elements appear in a game, but why they were chosen and how they function within the design.

Archive Laro adopts a flexible survey-based approach that functions as both a data collection instrument and an ethical interface between researcher and participant. Rather than treating developers solely as sources of information, the questionnaire is designed to support reflective responses about creative process, cultural intent, and representation, aligning with digital humanities approaches that treat metadata creation as an interpretive act (McDonald et al. 2021). Developers may answer selectively, provide generalized responses, or omit sensitive details, balancing scholarly rigor with respect for personal and professional boundaries. Contributors may also revise their entries, request takedowns, or choose pseudonymous attribution, reinforcing creator agency throughout the archival process.

The archive is hosted on a dedicated domain and designed for low-overhead maintenance, with modular blog-style entries that can be updated incrementally as new submissions are received. This design responds directly to evidence that large-scale, highly specified archival systems often become difficult to sustain once initial research phases conclude (Cross et al. 2015; Gleason 2024). By limiting required data fields while allowing rich optional description, Archive Laro aims to remain maintainable over time without sacrificing research utility. The current corpus includes documentation for over twenty Filipino-made games spanning solo developers, student teams, and independent studios, with entries covering genres from Metroidvania and psychological horror to rhythm games and educational RPGs.

Archive Laro contributes to ongoing discussions about regional and Global South perspectives in digital humanities. Filipino digital games often circulate outside formal preservation infrastructures and may be dismissed as niche, amateur, or commercially insignificant. Within the Philippine context, games have increasingly functioned as sites of cultural remediation, adapting local narratives, folklore, and historical themes into interactive media (Gungab 2023), yet these works remain under-documented and unevenly represented in global game archives. By treating them as culturally valuable artifacts worthy of documentation and scholarly attention, the project challenges dominant preservation narratives that privilege scale, commercial success, or Western production contexts. It also formalizes participatory archival impulses that scholars have observed in fan-driven preservation communities (Mora-Cantallops / Bergillos 2018), embedding these practices within an academic and ethical framework that ensures informed consent and attribution control.

By reporting on Archive Laro as a functioning digital humanities project, this paper contributes a case study of ethical, narrative-driven game documentation and demonstrates how culturally specific archives can be developed without replicating extractive or technically unsustainable preservation models. It invites broader discussion on how digital humanities practitioners might rethink preservation, authorship, and participation when working with interactive media and underrepresented creative communities.

Keywords: video game preservation, Filipino video games, narrative archiving, participatory documentation