Day 11 - Awareness and Final Abstract Results!
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 07:32:12 PM

Happy Friday everyone! I've got a short(er) but really cool update for you this time.

Campaign Status

Well, we're officially half-way through the campaign and we just crossed 50%, so this is a good sign!

Also it's day 3 here at Dice Tower West and lots of folks have been demoing the game.  Here's a quick shot of the table.  I'll be here all weekend recruiting more people for the cause!  If you're here come say hi!

Component Spotlight - Awareness Markers

In today’s Component Spotlight we are going to focus on the Awareness Markers. 

These 8 domed beads are one of the most handled components in the game. The marker’s location, whether on a card’s face, back or on a Noting Token, helps define the status of its thought card, so it will move frequently as the thoughts both intensify and quiet during the tug of war.

Below, in today’s Nevermind The Theory I’ll talk in more depth about the difference between attention and awareness in meditation, but for the sake of the game they are used somewhat interchangeably. During meditation, the attention should remain on the breath while the awareness is observing everything else.  Since the latter is more in line with the way the markers work, they are called Awareness Markers instead of Attention Markers.

I first saw this particular component used in Awaken Realms’ This War of Mine representing water, and fell in love with how they magnified everything they were placed on. When I first began designing Nevermind The Distraction, I knew immediately this was the exact component I wanted for Awareness. Being perfectly clear it doesn’t represent anything by itself, but magnifies everything else which is perfect for representing distractions.

For the prototypes that went out for this Kickstarter, I used flat, but tall-ish acrylic discs. These look great on the table and are nice and easy to handle, but they don’t have the magnifying effect the domed ones do.

As I'm here at Dice Tower West I'm talking to all the folks sitting down to play the game and many seem to like the flat acrylic disks.  They don't have the magnifying effect of the domed beads, but they can be a little easier to see through.  So even though I have my designer's heart set on the domed ones, I'll keep collecting feedback to see what the consensus is.

What do you think? Leave a comment if you have a clear preference.

Nevermind The Theory - Awareness vs. Attention

In The Mind Illuminated, my favorite book about meditation so far, Dr. John Yates talks about the differences between attention and awareness in the context of meditation.  Attention is being able to focus on one thing, such as your breath, whereas awareness is being peripherally conscious of everything else going on around you.

The goal is being able to do both of these at the same time. One example if this might be while driving your attention may be on the road and traffic in front of you while your awareness extends to traffic on all sides as well as the radio and passengers.

In meditation, the intention is to keep the attention on the breath while the awareness observes everything else. At first this can feel a little like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time (if you’ve never tried this you should, right now… don’t worry, I’ll wait). It does take some practice and getting used to.

The most accurate analogy I have come up with to this combined attention and awareness in meditation  comes from the 1990’s Magic Eye poster fad. Do you remember these? 

The image looks like a random blotchy pattern, but if you sort of half cross your eyes and shift your focus to a point behind and through the image, your peripheral vision suddenly sees a three-dimensional object floating in the space in front of the pattern, in this case, a shark!

To me this is really close to what it feels like to meditate. Your focus (or, attention) is on your breathing, but at the same time you can peripherally observe all kinds of weird things coming and going within the mind. Then your focus shifts as, pulling the attention from the breath,  you try to look at a thought more closely and the whole things falls apart. You have to re-center your focus on the breath to open your peripheral awareness back up again.

Using this analogy, meditating regularly would be a little like training our eyes to see the 3D images hidden in everything.  This may explain why a lot of meditators look like they know something the rest of us don’t!

Creating Distractions - Abstract Results!

The results are in!  

Say hello to our final Abstract Series Distraction Pack! 

I don't know about you all but I think this is amazing!!  What does everyone think?  

On Sunday we will start collecting ideas for that final Life Series Distraction Pack.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-AJ

Day 9 - The Mind and Abstract Image Voting
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 09:35:26 AM

All right, by now everyone knows the drill, so let's get right to it!

Campaign Status

Well, we're officially one week down of three and almost half way to being funded, so that's pretty good!  

Starting today and through the weekend I will be at Dice Tower West in Las Vegas demoing Nevermind The Distraction in the Demo Zone and hopefully bringing you more backer-kin!  If you are there, come find me and say hi! Let me know you’re a backer and receive a big hug - or a crisp high five - your choice!

Because I’m splitting my time between the convention and the Kickstarter, you may notice me being a little slower to respond in the campaign. After the weekend things should be back to normal and I can give you all my undivided attention again.

Component Spotlight - Mind Cards

Every contest needs an opponent and in Nevermind The Distraction, as in meditation, the closest thing you have to an opponent is your mind. Today’s component spotlight will take a look at the Mind Cards. 

The Mind Deck is comprised of 16 mind cards which take the place of the opponent A.I. within the game’s tug of war framework.

Each round begins with drawing a Mind Card and discarding it face up.  Each Mind Card indicates two pieces of information, the Mind Focus (colored-in square) and Noting Focus (colored-in dot). The Mind Focus shows the thought card in the consciousness grid that is focused on that round, and the indicated thought card is escalated one step closer to becoming a distraction. 

The Noting Focus (dot) is ignored in the first few stages and like the Center card, mentioned in the previous update, comes into play in later games after some perfect wins have let you unlock higher complexity.  Also, there are some future game variants in early development that will use the Noting Focus in interesting ways, so the Mind Cards included in this version of the game will have plenty of room to grow as the game does.

After the Mind Card is drawn and the indicated thought intensified, the Mind Phase is over and it becomes The Watcher’s (player’s) turn to take an action to de-escalate a different thought.

These rounds are repeated until the Mind Deck runs out at which time it is shuffled and reset. However, when the Mind Deck is shuffled the cards are also randomly (individually) rotated so the orientation of each card is mixed up as compared to the previous deck state. This creates a randomization where some thoughts may be focused on multiple times and some not at all which is more convincing and authentic to the way the mind seems to work during a real meditation.

Nevermind The Theory - I am Not My Thoughts 

In meditation, our minds are constantly trying to divert the attention away from our breath to keep us distracted and cause time to be wasted.  With the mind causing these frequent distractions and our meditating intent to let them go, the result is an almost tangible tug of war going on inside our heads.

But let’s unpack that for just a second. Think back to the last time you played a tug of war. Maybe it was a stick and you were playing with your dog, or it may have been a rope stretched over a mud puddle opposite some grade school classmates. There’s one common ingredient needed in any tug of war, pretty much by definition, an opponent!

A common realization with new meditators, and the one having the single biggest impact on me personally, goes something like this:

'I feel a tug of war for my attention going on inside my head.'

'By definition a tug of war can only happen between opponents.'

'But this is happening inside my head, so which of these opponents is Me?'

As I mentioned in one of the previous updates, most of us believe that our thoughts, or our mind, or that inner monologue we have constantly running represents our core identity.  If we see something that angers us, the voice inside our head says “I’m angry” and we instantly believe it, because why wouldn’t we, after all, WE thought it right?

But after meditating a while and having these questions about which of the tug of war opponents is Me, we start to realize maybe those thoughts don’t represent our core identity after all. At first, meditation is about learning not to let our minds distract us, but soon it becomes about not letting our minds define us.

We soon realize that yes, our minds are a part of who we are, like a hand, eyebrow or elbow, but it does not define us any more than any other singular part. We don’t walk around saying “I am my elbow!”. Instead of being made out of muscles, tendons and nerves, our minds are made out of experiences. The hopes, fears, and lessons we collect throughout life are only software running inside a hardware shell of muscle and bone.

Put simply, our minds are just our programming.

Programming can be changed.

This shift in perspective is an extraordinary thing, and liberating in so many ways. We realize our minds are no different than our hands or feet. They are part of us sure, but we control them, not the other way around. One obvious benefit is controlling our minds is easier because we start to look at the thoughts more as an outside observer which gives us space to react to these thoughts more mindfully.

One less obvious but possibly more profound benefit is the improvement to our mental health when we stop associating our thoughts as part of our identity. Its much easier to reduce guilt, self-loathing, fear, jealousy and any number of difficult emotions when we can clearly see the thoughts that caused them were just the result of our glitchy software, not who we are. In other words:

I am Not my thoughts.

This realization that the mind is no different than any other controllable part of our bodies is incredibly empowering.  If our minds are just software programmed by a lifetime of unreliable connections made between random experiences, mindfulness is the key to debugging it.

Creating Distractions - Space Image Voting!

Wow, you’ve all come up with some really fantastic images!  I’ve separated them into categories so our final pack has some nice diversity.

Vote on your favorite images using the link below and the most popular two from each category will go into the final Space Pack.

https://forms.gle/7iD2BME2vpZMk7vo8

You'll have until 9am on Friday to cast your votes and the winners will be announced in Friday's update.

Good luck on the voting and I'll see you Friday!

-AJ

Day 7 - Game vs. Meditation and the Abstract Theme Winner!
almost 2 years ago – Mon, Mar 06, 2023 at 09:23:49 AM

Happy Monday!  I hope everyone had a great weekend!

Campaign Status

Just under 1-week into the campaign and we are over 40% of the way there! Things are slowing down a bit, but this is normal.  I've got some plans this week that might help give us a boost. Stay tuned!

Component Spotlight - Center Card

Today I’m going to talk about the Center card. You’ll know this one right away because outside the rulebook it’s the only component in the whole game with any instructions on it, and this is one instruction you really don’t want to forget!  

Like the timer deck, this technically isn’t its own component, but one of the cards in the Distraction Packs.  This card represents your continued intention to focus on your breath, so it acts as a reminder, or anchor, to the meditation. The idea is not that we are so laser focused on our breath that other thinking is drowned out or impossible. The type of focus we are looking for is steady and solid, but still light enough to allow for peripheral awareness of the goings on around it.

One of the steps common in beginning meditation is near the end of the session, after you’ve spent the last several minutes trying to notice when the mind has distracted you.  At this point, you are allowed to relax your focus on the breath and let the mind wander off and do whatever it had been wanting to do, sort of letting it free.

A funny thing happens as soon as you give your mind permission to wander where it will; it stops trying to.  It’s like catching a tiny bird between your cupped palms and feeling it flutter and fight for freedom and then finally opening your hands to see it stop; sitting there calmly.

This moment brings an important sense of clarity and is one of my favorite parts of my meditation. It has been represented in the game by flipping the center card over at the very end of the game when you are tallying your score. Not only do you get to reveal the imagery on the card for the first time, but you’re also awarded a point for completing the session.  

In the beginning levels (stages) of the game, the Center cards from all 3 packs are shuffled together and placed on the center spot in the consciousness grid and only one gets revealed at the end, as mentioned above.  However, in later game stages after you’ve unlocked many other challenges and game mechanics, those Center cards can be used to trigger powerful and possibly game changing special actions to help in a time of need.

At first these center cards don’t look like they do much more than visually anchor the tableau, and at first, this is mostly true. Later in the journey though you’ll be glad you remembered to breathe.

Nevermind The Theory - The Game vs. Real Meditation 

In a previous update, we talked about the challenges of gamifying meditation responsibly. Today, I’d like to look at this one from the opposite angle.  We’ve identified that by keeping the game length down, the turns quick, the choices low and the repetition high, we can effectively represent the core principles of meditation without straying too far from its roots.  

Having meditated (mostly) consistently 15-20 minutes a day, every day for several years, it wasn’t too difficult to develop simple mechanics that accurately simulated a meditation.  The hybrid tug of war / whack a mole of the base game is extremely true to real meditation. I’ve had playtesters who meditate regularly laugh at how accurate it can sometimes feel.

It quickly became apparent that accurate simulation wasn’t going to be enough though. Frankly, as a game it was boring. Somehow, I had to make it fun while staying as true as possible, to those core principles at least, if not in the actual mechanics.

There are two main places where accurate simulation ended up really hampering the fun factor in a game sense.  The first is that during actual meditation, you focus on the breath and let those thoughts come and go in the background, not doing anything but observing them peripherally. It’s only when you notice you’ve been distracted and the mind has wandered that you step in and pull the attention back to the breath, like correcting the steering on a car that has drifted onto the shoulder.

It wasn’t hard to develop a card mechanic where thoughts could come AND go on their own without needing player intervention.  The problem is you could go several rounds without ever actually DOING anything, just watching thought cards flip face up and then flip face down.  This is completely accurate to the way meditation works, but boring as heck on the table.  By allowing the player to start the tug of war once a thought was revealed, it allows for constant player engagement, and only rarely does a situation occur where a turn is skipped. This is not how meditation works though, and so was one of the concessions where game design won out over simulation accuracy.

The second problematic feature of accurate simulation is during a meditation you may notice you have been distracted by a thought and go through the steps to acknowledge it and and refocus your awareness on the breath, only to have the mind distract you with the same thought again. And again.  You get a kind of “but I JUST cleaned that!” feeling which is completely accurate to meditation, but sort of anti-fun.

The Let Go mechanic was introduced, placing the awareness on the back of the card effectively “Blocking” the mind from being able to trigger that thought again. In a real meditation, refocusing the awareness on the breath and letting go of the thought happen simultaneously by nature. Splitting them into two actions is slightly inaccurate, and so is being able to lock a thought away from the mind’s manipulation. However, it does give the player a bit more agency over the long term outcome as well as provide a sense of progression.

The decision was made to stay as true to the core Notice / Acknowledge / Return Focus loop of true meditation because these are the actual steps one would take to do it in their head.  However, these steps may be executed slightly different mechanically from real meditation to make the game fun.

If there is interest, I have considered doing a video showing a more accurate meditation simulation using the Nevermind components just for the heck of it.  I have also considered including a variant in the rulebook so players could do it themselves if they really want. Let me know in the comment section if you have any interest in either of these.

Creating Distractions - Our First Winner & Call for Images

The results are in, and the theme for the final Distraction Pack of the Abstract Series Core box is…. drumroll please….

Oil and Water was hot on its tail for most of the race, but who doesn't want a little extra space in their life right? 

Now our next task is to start looking for images for the Space pack.

Image Criteria

In Update 2, I talked a little about what I look for in the imagery that makes up a Distraction Pack. I'll summarize these below:

Each single image should meet the following criteria:

1. It should be a high-quality representation of its media/genre. Examples include being colorful, having high detail, good contrast, good composition, and visual interest. Put another way, it should be something you would frame!
2. It should invoke a sense of curiosity, wonder or mild surprise.
3. It should be neutral in emotional tone in a way lets the player attach their own preconceptions to it.

For this Abstract Series, specifically, images should also:

1. Be slightly unrecognizable at first glance. If the subject itself is familiar, it could be shown from an unfamiliar perspective or scale.
2. Have no identifiable proper orientation or horizon. The cards should be able to be rotated in any direction and not feel sideways or upside down.

For the final 8-card collection as a whole, the images should:

1. Make a concerted effort to showcase the most diverse representation of its theme possible within 8 images.
2. Be visually diverse with different patterns, color palettes and compositions.

For the Center card specifically, the image should have a circular or radial composition like these: 

 So keep an eye out for any Space images that look like this compositionally for the pack’s Center card.

Image Search

In order to make sure we do not violate any copyright by using images we don’t have a commercial license for, all images we use must be available via Creative Commons for commercial use.  The easiest way to do this and make sure we are not violating anything accidentally is to limit ourselves to a few stock image sites which have such a license.

For this reason, I can only accept submissions from the Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay stock image libraries. The one exception that can be made here, specifically because of the Space theme, is using the NASA Image library, which are available for commercial use.

Click one of these links and once you are on one of those platforms, you can be as creative as you like with your browsing or keyword searches and long as the submitted images fall within the Space theme and the criteria above, they will most likely be accepted.  These do not have to be photos from telescopes, some can be artist created imaginings!

As much as I would love to, I will not be able to use images you created yourself, so please, ONLY images from the above sources.

Image Submission

Once you have found an image you like in either the Pexels, Unsplash, Pixabay or  NASA, libraries, copy/paste the link address from your web browser into the form linked below:

 Image Submission Form

As Before

• Some images may not make it to the next round of voting because they do not meet the criteria listed above.
• There are no limits to the number of submissions that can be made by each backer, go crazy!
• Inappropriate and/or offensive submissions will be ignored.

I will leave the form up until 9am(PST) on Wed March 8th at which time I will collect the submissions and prepare them for the voting.

That's all for today! Good luck image hunting!

-AJ

Day 5 - Gamification, Timing and Abstract Idea Voting
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Mar 04, 2023 at 10:15:36 AM

I'll do my best to keep this one a bit shorter, being the weekend and all. 

Campaign Status

We just crossed 100 backers a minute ago! Woohoo!  

In general, it looks like things are starting to level off a bit.  This is pretty normal for Kickstarter campaigns though. I will continue to do everything I can to get the word out about this game. Yesterday I was in a clown suit dancing and spinning a Nevermind sign at busy intersection.  I don’t think I got us any new backers but I did get a lot of colorful comments on my shoes! (Ok, I made that up. Totally didn’t happen, but I will do it if I have to!)

Component Spotlight - Meditation Timer Deck

Today we are going to talk about the Meditation Timer deck, which is an important part of creating just the right amount of tension in a game session.  

The timer deck isn’t technically it’s own component. It is created during game setup and is comprised of the 19 cards remaining from the three chosen Distraction Packs after the consciousness grid is filled.

Time Passes 

There are a few events in the game which trigger “Time to Pass”.  This includes any time The Mind creates a Distraction or focuses again on a current Distraction. It also includes any time The Watcher (you) takes a successful Let Go action. Like life, time passing isn’t an inherently good or bad thing, it just is.  When “time passes” the top card of the timer deck is discarded face down.

When the timer deck is empty, the game is immediately over and the tableau is scored to see how you did. Keeping track of how much time has passed can be helpful in deciding which actions to take and how much to push your luck with existing distractions.

Stack Order 

Another important function of the timer deck has to do with card organization and significantly speeding up putting the game away.  Nevermind The Distraction could be played by shuffling all 3 Distraction Packs together, placing the top 8 cards onto the consciousness grid and setting the rest aside as the timer.  This is what the setup GIF shows, and is conceptually close enough to what you are doing for broad representation, though in actuality there’s a bit more to it.

The challenge comes in with the fact that the thought cards are images on one side and blank white backs on the other.  There is very intentionally no writing, iconography, designation or instruction of any kind on any of the cards because the text takes away from the experience and makes the flow state we are looking for harder to achieve.

Therefore, the example of shuffling the three chosen Distraction Packs together during setup would work just fine for game play, but would makes putting the game away a painful slog of separating and sorting the timer deck into its original packs by referring to the art index diagrams.

This is where the second use of the timer deck comes into play.  The 8 cards that go onto the consciousness grid are taken blindly from their packs and shuffled together, and then the remaining cards in each pack are stacked to create the timer deck with each Title Card used as a separator of the stacks. This results in an end game condition where the 3 Distraction Packs used were kept nice and separated in the timer and you only have to sort the 8 cards that were out on the table, which only takes seconds.

These setup instructions may seem a little convoluted at first, but they quickly become second nature and make all the difference in keeping your library organized and setup/teardown time to a minimum.

Nevermind The Theory - The Pitfalls of Gamifying Meditation 

I mentioned in a previous update this idea that there is no good or bad, right or wrong in meditation. This is an important thing to remember because it can be easy to get discouraged at first, feeling like you may be doing it wrong, or it isn’t working. I lot has been written about why this is, mostly versions of theorizing it’s the ego’s self defense mechanism because the goal of meditation is to essentially take the ego out of the driver’s seat.  I’m not going to get into that depth here, but it is interesting reading. Eckhart Tolle writes about this kind of thing frequently.

What I want to talk about here is the sort of danger of misrepresenting core meditation principles by trying to gamify it. In a game intended to actually teach meditation, it’s really important to represent the core concepts clearly and accurately.  So if an essential part of understanding the principles of meditation involves embracing this idea that there is no right or wrong, good or bad way to meditate, how do you turn it into a Game -which by its very definition has a win/lose condition- without misrepresenting meditation entirely?

A similar parallel question is, if meditation is about learning to restrain the thinking mind, and gaming is about problem-solving which requires the thinking mind, isn’t a game about meditation an exercise in contradiction, possibly even hypocrisy?

These were exactly the thought experiments I began noodling on one hot July night in 2020.  It sort of rattled around in my brain for a couple days in the same way the age old “does red look the same to me as it does to you?” conundrum.  It wasn’t until I started thinking about how it could actually be done that I decided it sounded like a fun challenge and began designing Nevermind The Distraction in earnest.  Early versions of the game were really not much more than exploring if such a thing could even be accomplished while still being true to its core principles.

Regarding the first issue, I discovered it isn’t so much the winning or losing of the game that felt contradictory to the principles, it was the personal stake we often feel in a win or loss.  So I set out to create a game where winning or losing was more like a finger in the air, checking the direction of the wind, without a personal attachment to the outcome. If you’ve ever played Klondike (classic) solitaire, you probably recognize the feeling. A win doesn’t feel like a particularly great achievement and a loss doesn’t feel all that bad either. With Klondike it’s usually not about winning or losing, but more about passing the time or keeping occupied.

After studying this phenomenon quite a bit, I discovered the secret was in the game’s length.  The longer a game goes on, the more attached to the outcome we become, probably because of the relative value of our limited time. A win feels like more of an achievement and a loss incurs more frustration. Solving the problem of personal attachment to a win or loss became a matter of finding the right game length.

Coincidentally, Klondike solitaire also solves the other issue, regarding the problem-solving mind. This is mainly achieved through a combination of simple choices, short turns and lots of repetition. The simpler the available choices, the harder it is for the mind to overthink the options and the less likely the mind is to personalize the outcome because the cognitive overhead is low.  The more I thought about this the more I realized it almost perfectly represented meditation, which also has limited choices, simple steps and LOTS of repetition.

A side benefit I didn’t discover until playtesting is that this blend of short game length, simple choices, quick turns and repetition actually created the perfect conditions for the player to enter a Flow State somewhat similar to meditation. The mind is occupied just enough to quiet its incessant chatter, letting you gently focus on the game in almost the same way you’d focus on the breath in a real meditation.

Look for more about this Flow State in a later update.

Creating Distractions - Your First Vote!

Well, your ideas for the final Distraction Pack of the Abstract series have been collected and there have been some really interesting ones! I have to say, I’m enjoying the prospect of this collaboration a lot!

Like I mentioned in the previous update, if you don’t see your submission in here it is likely because it was either too specific to fit within the diverse nature needed for the core box, too similar to something already done in one of the other packs, or it didn’t meet the criteria for Abstract.  If any submissions didn't work for Abstract but will work for the Life Series, I'll automatically include them when we go to creating that pack. 

Below are the themes that have been collected so far.  I've included an example image for each theme submitted to give an idea of what this might look like.  Remember you're voting on the theme, not the example image!  We'll work together on images for the winning theme next. 

Now you get to vote to let me know which themes you like the best!  We’ll be using ranked choice voting for this which means you will select your first choice, second choice, third choice… and so on. This system of voting should result in a winner that more widely appeals to all voters.  Click the link below to cast your ranked choice votes.

 https://www.rcv123.org/ballot/7nCMngxaRRuob3QUJ1PwSX 

You’ll have until 9am(PST) on Monday, March 6th to cast your votes!

That's all for today. Have a great weekend! 

-AJ

Day 3 - Distractions and Abstractions
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 05:25:37 PM

Strap in, this is a bit of a long one! We are going to talk about distractions, which is the single most important core concept in the entire project, so there’s a lot to cover.  They won’t all be this long, I promise!

But before we get into all that…

Campaign Status

We are 3 days into our 21-day campaign and over a third of the way to the funding goal. Overall, pretty good!

I do want to take a quick second to thank some of the game publishers who helped me along the way and have backed Nevermind over the last couple days.

The first is Orange Nebula, the creators of two of my favorite games, Vindication and Unsettled.  Not only were they very much directly responsible for inspiring me to make this game via their podcast The Outpost but I think they may represent the largest collection of amazing human beings working under one roof. Their Discord server is my favorite place on the internet, and the community there has been so amazingly supportive of this crazy endeavor!  Thank You!

Second is Max Seidman of Resonym Games who was my mentor through the Tabletop Mentorship Program. Anything that goes right with this campaign is because of his advice and depth of knowledge (and anything that goes wrong is probably because I didn’t listen!)

Finally Juli of Distant Rabbit Games, creators of the very cool 2-player social deduction game Mantis Falls, who was so helpful with a ton of great early advice when I first got started heading down this Kickstarter path and pointed me to the mentorship program.

I’m just so lucky to have had the benefit of these folks’ advice, experience and support throughout this venture and now humbled beyond words to have them as backers. I hope I don’t let you guys down!

Ok onto the fun stuff!

Component Spotlight - Distraction Packs

Nevermind The Distraction is comprised of themed 10-card Distraction Packs which are the heart and soul of the game. It may seem silly because most of these cards are essentially just images on one side and blank white on the other, but there's more depth than you may expect.

Three Packs (themes) are chosen for each game, but the 8-card consciousness grid is filled randomly from them. You effectively decide what kinds of things you are going to meditate on, but the actual thoughts that pop up are a surprise. In this way, the library of themes the player can choose from should be general enough to offer something most people can relate to, but specific enough to feel somewhat personal. Since only 8 out of an available 30 cards are seen for each game, there’s plenty of visual variation possible.

Representing Thoughts

Meditation is primarily about learning to develop a healthier relationship with your thoughts, so it makes sense that in a card game about meditation, most of the cards would represent thoughts. The 3x3 grid the game is played on represents the meditating consciousness. Each card within this consciousness is a thought that may pop up and eventually escalate to become a distraction.

The most random, oddball thoughts can float to the surface while meditating, often causing a surprised sort of “Where did THAT come from?” reaction. There’s an innate sense of curiosity that comes with this reaction, and as discussed in the previous update regarding Beginner’s Mind, curiosity is pretty important. It’s the flavor of this sort of surprised curiosity that has driven most of the development of the Distraction Packs. I chose themes and imagery intended to grab the player’s attention in a similar way.

The goal of meditation is to observe what your mind does on its own and learn to react to it (or not) appropriately. Therefore, it is important that the imagery in meditation cards does not try to push any specific tone or meaning. These cards are meant to go beyond representing a thought and actually prompt real thoughts of your own. The exercise is more meaningful when the player connects to the imagery on a personal level.

Of course, the tricky part is that there are billions of us, each with our own unique way of thinking. How do you come up with imagery that feels like it could actually be something you could think about, no matter who you are, and still convey a sense of wonder? I decided that the best approach was to seek beauty in the mundane.

When we look at something recognized as commonplace, it's easy to make a personal connection. However, finding the most beautiful representation of that everyday object can elevate it into something really special. We start to see the potential beauty in everything, even the simple, everyday things.

Themed Packs 

Collecting similar ‘thought’ imagery into themed decks lets the player generally customize what they are meditating on. Having multiple cards in each deck (only a few of which are seen in any game), allows for that intended sense of surprise and curiosity. Each themed pack should contain the most beautiful, evocative, yet emotionally tone-neutral images representing its theme.  Looked at collectively, each pack also needs to be comprised of the most diverse examples of its theme to potentially connect with the widest range of people while still being visually diverse. Each card should stand out as its own unique work of art within a larger gallery of similar subject matter.

Criteria for Images

It became obvious that in order to connect with the widest range of people possible on a meaningful level, diversity was going to be as crucial as beauty. As mentioned above, this needed to be a visual diversity as well as a representational one. I wasn’t sure if the kind of visual diversity needed could be achieved using a single illustrator. I chose to use the fantastically diverse set of assets offered up for Creative Commons use on platforms such as Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay to achieve the desired range of variation.  I have combed through tens of thousands of images to find what is, in my opinion anyway, the very best to showcase in this game.

All of the featured artists will be credited on the Index Dividers and it is my intent that should the campaign overfund by more than 250%, a portion of the savings gained by increasing the order size will be shared with all of those featured artists.

Card Material

Nevermind The Distraction is an intentionally tactile game, with premium-feeling components to offer beauty on more than just a visual level. One of the reviewers likened playing it to a Japanese tea ceremony where each component is as intentional as the actions required to interact with them.

With the cards being the backbone of the game, they need to look and feel premium as well as be durable enough to sustain frequent handling. Currently the project is budgeted for 350gsm black core linen finished cards with UV coating. The corners are custom cut with large 1/2” corners to evoke the softness of a thought bubble. The UV coating will keep the cards long-lasting and will allow for wiping them down to keep the frequent use from showing on the plain white backs.

Future Distractions

Should this project be successful beyond the scope of this crowdfunding campaign, my intent is to continue releasing new and varied Distraction Packs for as long as there is an interest.  My dream is to eventually be able to offer players the ability to personalize their games by choosing from a vast library of available Distraction Packs so each session is as personal as being inside their own heads.

Finally, Nevermind The Distraction began life as a Print-and-Play game, and my intent is to continue to honor those roots.  The Distraction Packs were purposely designed so an entire pack, including all 10 cards and the divider, can be printed on a single US-Letter sized sheet of paper.  

This way, as more Distraction Packs become available to download and print at home, each core box can be further customized to include packs that more directly speak to that player.

Nevermind The Theory - Core ‘Noticing Distractions’ Loop 

One of the most common misconceptions I’ve run across in talking about meditation with people is this idea that the goal of meditation is “not thinking”.  It’s common to hear some version of the response:

“Isn’t that where you just sit still and you aren’t even allowed to think?”

The answer is most definitely “No.”

You ARE actually allowed to think, encouraged even, in a roundabout way. The idea of meditation is to pick an object to anchor your attention to, usually your breath, and then maintain that centrally focused attention while in the background the mind sort of thinks normally (I say normally, which is not strictly true, but I’ll come back to that in a minute). The goal in meditation is to keep this primary focus on the breath to sort of introduce some space between you and the normal stream of conscious thought. Put a different way, you can think, but the thinking goes on in the background.  It’s almost like being on an important telephone call while a movie is playing in the same room.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve had this happen many times. I’m watching a movie or television show and an important call comes in.  I really need to pay attention to the person on the other line, so I turn down the TV or pause the movie.  Well, what if you couldn’t do that?  What if you had to learn to tune out the movie on your own to focus on the conversation?  Sounds like it could be done, with some practice right?  Ok, now imagine if the movie was somehow aware of the call and was not only trying to pull your attention away but was doing so in the context of the conversation?

You’re on this call and coming from the TV you hear:

     “That reminds me, tell them what happened at work today!”

          or

     “Do they think you don’t know that already?”

          or

     “They’re lying to you…”

That sort of thing would make it much harder to keep the movie and the call separate right?

But that’s pretty much exactly what our mind is doing to us constantly. It’s providing a continuous, peanut-gallery style stream of opinions, assumptions and guesses about what is happening around us.  This manufactured context is frequently inaccurate at best and makes it really tough to focus on the actual situation objectively.

The real problem is we’ve come to rely on that inner voice. Worse, we identify ourselves with that inner voice.  That voice IS Me.

This is the normal way of thinking for most of us and has serious consequences, but I’ll touch on that more in a different update.  Whether you identify yourself AS that voice in your head or not, there’s no denying there are times in life where it is situationally appropriate to ignore it.

Let’s say some guy in a big noisy truck cuts you off on the road to work.

“Wow! That guy just cut me off!”  - an accurate, objective assessment of the situation

“He must think he owns the road and he’s more important than me!”  - the mind fabricating context

“I should chase him down and give him a piece of my mind!” - even if this advice isn’t heeded, odds are this has ruined your mood and the drive.

(Never mind the REAL context is he had actually swerved to miss a dog that had run out into the road!)

This is where meditation comes in. We sit and focus on the breath while thoughts come and go in the background. Because we are focused on the breath, we are aware of the these thoughts but we don’t engage with them.  ‘In The Mind Illuminated’,  Dr. John Yates describes this state as “peripheral awareness”.  Your attention is on your breath, but you are still peripherally aware of your thoughts. Put another way, we know there is a movie going on in the background, but we are focused on the call right now. This is the general goal of meditation.

The challenging part is it’s MUCH easier said than done!  We’ve spent our entire lives listening to, relying on and even identifying with those thoughts in our head.  Learning to let them flutter on in the background while we focus on something else is HARD.

Thankfully the solution is very simple.

1. Focus on the breath while letting thoughts come and go, like watching clouds float by.
2. At some point you will Notice you completely forgot your breath and hitched your cart to some mental train of thought and ran off with it.  (THIS WILL HAPPEN! It is meant to. It is part of the process and it means you are doing it right!) 
3. Give yourself a little mental pat on the back because noticing you’ve been distracted is hard and it’s worth Acknowledging the accomplishment.  (SIMPLE POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT like teaching a dog to roll over using treats.) 
4. Let go of the distracting thought without judgement and return your attention to your breath.

That’s literally all there is to it. You just repeat those steps. Over and over and over. No matter how many times it takes. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of Hundreds of Thousands. It’s an entire lifetime of conditioning you’re training yourself to overcome. Be diligent.  Don’t judge yourself.  Don’t lose hope. And whatever you do… Don’t. Stop.

OK, so what does this look like from inside?

     <focusing on the breath>

     In… and Out..

     In… and Out..

     In… and Out..   ‘I wonder what Gary is doing?’

     In… and Out..   ‘My left foot itches’

     In… and Out..   ‘I need to book that dentist appointment’

     In… and Out..   ‘In-N-Out makes a really good burger’

     ‘and now I’m hungry.’

     ‘Their fries are good too.’

     ‘Man their drive-thru lines are long though’

     ‘I remember the last time I went there I…’

     ‘wait a minute, I got distracted by thinking about burgers and forgot about my breath’

     ‘Heh, that’s pretty cool, I caught myself’

     ‘Good job me!’

     In… and Out..

     In… and Out.. ‘sheesh, this post is really dragging on’

And so on.

And after a couple of weeks of doing this for only 10 minutes a day, you get sort of used to what the mind distracting you feels like and this happens:

Some guy in a big noisy truck cuts you off on the road to work.

“Wow! That guy just cut me off!”  - an accurate, objective assessment of the situation

“He must think he owns the road and he’s more important than me!”  - the mind completely fabricating context

“I should chase… “  <this feels familiar…>

“wait a minute, I got distracted by anger and adrenaline… ”

“Heh, it’s awesome this is not going to ruin my morning!”

“Good job me!”

In… and Out..

“I’m totally getting a burger for lunch”

This Notice you’ve been distracted / Acknowledge that achievement / Let go and return the Focus to the breath loop is literally ALL there is to beginning meditation, and it has very real benefits. The secret sauce is a staggering amount of repetition and persistence. This is why these steps became the core mechanic in Nevermind The Distraction. My hope is that Daniel San style, learning-karate-by-waxing-cars, these steps become engrained in the player’s subconscious and help encourage a little mindfulness even if the game doesn’t inspire them to actually pick up meditation.

Creating Distractions - Abstract Ideas Needed

Today we’re going to start the process of designing that last Distraction Pack for the Abstract Series game box. If you’ve read the Component Spotlight above, you may have an understanding of the sort of criteria that goes into doing this.  We will start by collecting ideas for the theme for this pack.

The other Distraction packs in the Abstract Series Core Box are:

• Architecture
• A Closer Look (macrophotography)
• Fractal Art
• Modern Art
• Mother Nature
• Textures
• The View Below (satellite imagery)

Theme Criteria

For the Abstract Series, there are a few things that need to stay consistent with the other packs, so these should be taken under consideration when thinking about themes for our new one.

1.   As touched on in the campaign page, the Abstract Packs are meant to work on more of a subconscious level.  The idea here is they are almost like Rorschach (ink blot) tests in the sense they are hard to identify at first, and deciding what they are is less of a conscious thing and more instinctual.

2.  To the extent possible, the imagery on these cards should not have an easily identifiable proper orientation or horizon. The cards should be able to be rotated in any direction and not feel sideways or upside down.

3.  It is important for the themes and imagery in these Core Series boxes to be as broad and commonplace as possible.  In order to get the most out of the game/exercise it is important the player relates to what they are looking at on some subconscious level. Imagery that is too specific or themes that are completely unfamiliar are unlikely to develop that personal connection necessary for the player to identify with it as an actual “Thought”.

4.  This last theme should be different enough from the other 7 (listed above) that it feels distinct and separate.

Most of these will come into play more when we start collecting art and imagery for the winning theme, but it helps to know what we will be looking for down the road.  For instance, a theme about animals will be tough to get to work with criteria #2 and a theme about carburetors won’t work for #3.

Sharing your Ideas - Comment with #abstractidea

For this one, what I’d like to do is have anyone with an idea share it in the comment section in either this update or the main comment section on the campaign page.  Starting your comment with #abstractidea will help me find them easier when collecting them for everyone to vote on in the next update. Some examples could be:

•  #abstractidea sky (clouds, sunsets, etc)
•  #abstractidea space (stars, planets, nebulae)
•  #abstractidea patterns

You’ll have until the cutoff at 9am(PST) on Sat March 4th at which time I’ll start pulling the ideas together for backer voting.

There is a chance some theme ideas may not make it to the voting, probably because they don’t fit the criteria outlined above but possibly for some other reason.  Also, similar ideas may be combined into a single theme. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) inappropriate or offensive suggestions will be ignored.

Idea submissions are not limited to one per backer.  Share as many ideas as you have, let loose!

Also, I know I’m asking for people to engage with the Comment Section and yet this is something I rarely do myself on the interwebs because those can be challenging spaces to engage with. I encourage everyone to prove these don’t have to be toxic spaces and treat each other with the respect and grace your fellow human beings deserve. If you are absolutely averse to posting your idea publicly, I completely understand and respect this choice.  Please feel free to message any ideas to me directly.

Ok, that's it for today!  If you read this far, you're a real trooper and deserve a treat for your dedication. Treat yourself to something special for me!

See you call in a couple days!

-AJ