I arrived in Berlin after a long and exhausting journey. I know Berlin well, but I haven’t been here for a while now. I slowly try to find the German in myself (I am half German) but I haven’t as yet found Germany in Berlin. Just now, I could be anywhere. I wonder: will the game aid or confuse this sense of non-location I am experiencing at this point in time?

I am filled with anticipation about tomorrow although I am aware that it will be a difficult day for me – it is, tomorrow, two months that my father died and I will be, for the first time since, on my own. I wonder whether the game will be ‘present’ enough within my life to displace my emotions. Will I feel less isolated because of it? Will I feel more connected? Connected to whom or what exactly?

I suppose that I am trying to pretend neutrality. I recall the fascinating conversations I recently had with Hugo Glendinning about his role as a photographer and the act of witnessing. I also recall two articles by Andy Crabtree, the ethnographer for this and many other Mixed Reality Lab/Blast Theory works (et al, 2005 and 2006) and the ending of one of them: ‘data is not a natural object which may be readily harvested, but a socially and materially constructed object produced for particular purposes’ (2006). What data will be derived through what is ultimately a subjective, autobiographical account of the game? I wonder how – what? why? who for? – will I write during the next 24 days…

All documents are charged. This one won’t pretend not to be. I will attempt a mixed mode of documenting through autobiography, contextual information, literary background, diversion and site-specific accounts. I will, of course, tell you about the game. I will attempt to say whether it affected me in any way. I will report some conversations (though not all of them) and I will tell you how I feel (but not always). I will take photographs of where I am each time I get a text message (within reason). I will probably misrepresent some occurrences, though I will try not to lie. I will make mistakes. Tell you too much. Not enough. Bore you to death. Nothing I will write will be neutral. The game you will read about will belong exclusively to me. The documentation will be that of my own sense of the game’s presence within my own everyday life. When you will play the game, your own sense of presence, engagement and awareness of the game’s pervasiveness will be entirely different, unless you are, by some strange coincidence of fate, a player, or figurine, in what is also my own game. Then, and then only, might we share aspects of the same world. Whoever you are, do remember that none of what I write is objective. There is no canon here to confront us with. My point of view should not be influential. Games, like art, produce powerful subjective experiences.

Having rung Matt Adams at HAU, I am aware that Blast Theory and Mixed Reality Lab are still at work while I write these pages. I know that they must be exhausted. I decide not to intrude for tonight. Distance, again. Maybe this is my first mistake. Or, perhaps, detachment is now the best option overall. In the city of Bertold Brecht and Heiner Müller I long for some sense of Verfremdung. And yet I struggle to build distance and ask myself, how will my knowledge of the game affect the way I play? Will I think of the game or its creators? How will the fact I do know something about the process of writing the game affect the editing of this documentation? How close is the world of games to that of film in terms of the ‘pervasiveness’ of its industry? What will be the aura or distance necessary for me to play and write about Day of the Figurines?

Folow this link to tomorrow's play Day of the Figurines 28/9/2006