From Embodied Play to Digital Heritage: Co-Designing a Community-Informed Multimedia Archive For Akan Folk Games in Ghana

<p>Akan folk games are embodied forms of intangible cultural heritage whose meanings arise from the relationship among language, song, movement, objects, space, rules, memory, and communal interpretation. This article reports the development of a community-informed digital archive for 13 selected Akan folk games documented in Asotwe, Drobo, and Kade, Ghana. The article presents the third objective of a qualitative-dominant, multi-phase doctoral study and uses evidence generated specifically for archive development, with limited evaluation evidence included only to explain prototype refinement. Forty-five purposively selected participants - nine elders and traditional authorities, six basic school teachers, twenty-four youth and students, and six community information and communication technology officers - contributed through 21 individual interviews, three site-based youth focus groups, observation, audiovisual documentation, co-design workshops, and direct prototype interaction. A combined inductive and objective-guided thematic analysis produced five design requirements: each game had to be represented as a relational cultural record; community-specific names and variants had to remain visible; video, audio, photographs, diagrams, and text had to operate as complementary evidence; access had to be bilingual, mobile-responsive, and educationally useful; and records had to remain open to correction and additional versions. Three site-based co-design workshops informed an initial working prototype, followed by one formal cross-site test-and-refinement cycle. Evaluation identified concrete changes to content organization, bilingual labeling, media relationships, mobile presentation, educational indexing, and correction pathways. The resulting system used a React interface, a REST application programming interface, and Firebase-supported data and media storage. The article contributes a relational community metadata model that structurally links provenance, performance, material culture, aesthetic form, cultural meaning, pedagogy, rights, version history, and preservation management. Responsible digitization is therefore presented as a negotiated and revisable process rather than simple media conversion.</p>