As we drive off towards the Moor, I realise that I arrived at Ron’s Top Chip Shop. JOANA is here, as are many saveloys. I have the feeling that I met JOANA before. I wonder why she is not moving. I drop my useless drum kit and have a saveloy after which I feel very fine indeed. I decide to try out the drums once more at the Locarno. I realise now that on my journeys I keep on meeting the same figurines, again and again, often immobile in their destinations. On occasion, the figurines' description presents a slight variation. For instance, a few days ago I met MARTIN who first was without and then with a defibrillator. This makes me realise that something might have happened. That an action has occurred. I cannot but wonder - why has MARTIN picked up a defibrillator. Is he going anywhere with it? Does he need it for anything? Is someone he knows sick? I find this fascinating as it is sometimes possible to reconstruct dramaturgies out of these flickering traces of players' behaviors.

There is a brilliant Forestry resort here at Haldon Forest which has a special drawing day for children. My daughter and her friend from her old nursery have a fantastic time at tracing nature and get really messy, playing with bones, leaves, mud, sand, in and out of huts, tents, trees. Strangely, I am reminded of Day of the Figurines, because although the destinations' table is so beautifully white, and the figurines perfect and evocative, there is something messy about the game. It's not only got to do with the players' deterioration, but also with the fact that messages are often short, sometimes incomplete, occasionally ungrammatical. I also find that repeated actions can imply a deterioration. I wonder how this (an inevitable consequence of playing for such a long time) changes my game.

We explore a Mongolian yurt, but the childern don't like it and head straight for a playground. I, on the other hand, think it's fantastic. There are many environmentalists and botanists inside, painting all sorts of things. Despite the confined space, they don't talk to each other. In a sense, we are a bit like this in the game. Sharing the same space - but in different rooms. I think again of that exciting explanation Martin Flintham offered about rooms and wish I understood it more fully at the time. Since receiving that personalised message yesterday suggesting that I should go to the Locarno, I think that I should go back there to see if there's anything exciting happening. I still wonder whether that message was sent manually - an operator or an orchestrator who became fed up with me moaning that I never meet anyone. Maybe someone in Berlin or Mixed Reality Lab took pity on me.

I think back to Stefanie Kuhn's feedback. I am intrigued that she enjoyed the Trampoline gossip, and think that the fact she identifies this as yet another layer or reading of the game is typical of how this game can be reconstructed, in all its complexity, as a palimpsest within which discontinuous and often even dialectically opposite narrative layers are present. I think it's also interesting that she refers to my virtual persona, since my role play and my life here sometimes blur - but more on this on another occasion. I like her identification of a now point - time present - as of crucial importance to the game and the image of the nomad, since I have been feeling like this both inside and outside the game. The two, the now point and the nomad, are of course tied. Stefanie Kuhn also draws my attention to something about the presence of another, or the other, in the writing. This is a fundamental aspect of my play and my autobiographical documentation of it here, both in terms of the messy relationship between me and my figurine, between myself as a player and researcher of this piece, between the materiality of where I am and the conceptual nature of the game, between my life and the game, the cultural and the ontological experience of it, what I am and am not saying, and even between an abstract reader and the specific reader who I am writing for. As the game progresses, of course, these different layers of presence pervade one another and hereby contaminate each other.

While I prepare my daughter's favourite pasta sauce, something that always makes me think back to the Langhe and those wonderful Italian trattorias where most Turinese still spend their Sunday lunches, I am back at the Locarno, thinking that finally I can perhaps play my drum kit. It goes terribly wrong again. Suddenly I have company. SUPER GIRL, SCOOBY, BERLIN and BARNEY (at last!) are here. SCOOBY has just whacked BARNEY on the head with something and BARNEY has a major headache and is not feeling too good. There is a wristband here, but I’m still too suspicious of wristbands to wear it. SCOOBY, who calls me 'Marge', and makes me smile, is looking for a drum kit. I feel I owe him one and so I drop mine so he can use it. Somehow, after all this silence, I am overwhelmed by company and so head off for the canal to find another drumkit. Maybe I am a nomad after all. A nomad with a longing for water...

To follow my game tomorrow go to Day of the Figurines 15/10/2006