Gameboys

Gameboys is a Filipino boys' love web series made by The IdeaFirst Company and released free on YouTube, where the first episode went up on 22 May 2020. Thirteen regular instalments and one special carried the opening season through to 13 September that year, and a second season of eight episodes arrived together on 30 July 2021. Ivan Andrew Payawal directed, Ash M. Malanum wrote it, and the dialogue moves between Tagalog and English as ordinary Manila conversation does.

The whole thing is presented as screenlife. The frame is a laptop or a phone display, and the story is assembled out of video calls, chat windows, game lobbies and livestream overlays, which is also how the two leads meet. Cairo Lazaro streams under the handle Caimazing; a viewer calling himself Angel2000 demands a rematch and turns out to be Gavreel Mendoza Alarcon, who is considerably more direct about his interest than Cairo is ready for. Their flirtation moves off the game and into scheduled calls. Quarantine keeps the pair in separate households for most of the run, so distance is not the only obstacle: Cairo is carrying a bereavement he will not talk about, Gavreel has a family with expectations, and Terrence Carreon arrives holding a claim on Cairo's past. Pearl Gatdula, Cairo's closest friend, spends the season refusing to let him withdraw entirely.

Distribution widened quickly after the YouTube run. Netflix carried a re-edited Level-Up Edition from 30 December 2020, and the Heart of Asia Channel took it to television on 13 June 2021. The series was nominated in the Kids: Live Action category at the 2021 International Emmy Kids Awards and won Best Web Series at the Indie Shorts Awards Seoul in 2020. A feature film, Gameboys: The Movie, followed on 31 July 2021. It is described as the first Filipino BL drama to be produced by a professional media outlet.