chludens.ch: Developing an Interactive Archive for Swiss Vintage Games and Its Community

The paper presents the design and development of chludens.ch, a digital web archive for Swiss vintage games and their surrounding community, produced as part of the CH LUDENS research project at the Zurich University of the Arts. The project's aim is to preserve a largely overlooked game development scene from the pre-Internet era and to make this cultural heritage accessible to both specialist researchers and the general public. Its central research question asks how a digital archive can remain adaptable, sustainable, and meaningful while data collection is still ongoing and heterogeneous in format.

The archive follows a practice-based, iterative design research method combining archival analysis, user interviews, data mapping, prototyping, and usability testing. Rather than collecting software or source code, the project adopts the "archiving the game without the game" approach promoted by the Swiss Videogame Archive Group, focusing instead on contextual materials such as interviews, gameplay videos, metadata, and historical documents. A key finding is that a flexible wiki structure with a filter system, supported by clear categorizations and systematic file naming, was needed to integrate diverse data types and map relationships between people, games, and institutions. The implementation uses a WordPress-based interface to present the data and link through to deeper raw data and physical archive content.

The authors situate the project within a fragmented Swiss landscape of institutions, including university game labs, museums, and grassroots platforms, where collections often overlap without a coordinated national strategy. Analysis of existing game archives such as MobyGames, Swiss Game Garden, and Game UI Database informed the design, and collaborations with some of these platforms are described as strengthening data exchange. The methodology is qualitative and developmental rather than quantitative, relying on Data Jam workshops, internal test rounds, and a public demonstration at the Vintage Computing Festival 2025 instead of survey samples. The archive currently comprises three collections, the Swiss Game Design Archive (1966–2000), an Arcade Collection, and a Platform Timeline, and the paper frames archiving as an ongoing maintenance process.