Welcome to Day 1 of the Nevermind The Distraction Campaign!
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 09:08:06 PM
Wow, what a day! Almost 25% of the way there in just 12 hours! That's fantastic! Anyway, welcome to the campaign! And Update One also known as 'Too Many Exclamation Points!'
What can I say, I'm excited!
Anyway, thanks for joining the campaign! Read on to find out a little more about what's in store for the next three weeks. <--- (first period)
TL:DR Campaign update emails every 2 days for the next 3 weeks
More than two years have passed since the first Print-and-Play version of this game was released on BoardGameGeek. If you’re one of the Nevermind fans who have been following this project since then, egging me on to do a full release, Thank You! If it wasn’t for your unexpectedly enthusiastic and unwavering support, this Kickstarter would never have come to pass!
If you’re new to Nevermind The Distraction, welcome! This passion project started the summer of 2020 amidst the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 lockdown. The goal has been to develop a fun, stress-relieving game anyone can play that also works on a deeper level to introduce the core principles of mindfulness. Thousands of hours have gone into the game’s development as well as preparing for this Kickstarter and the (hopefully!) eventual full-scale global release. I just can’t wait to share it with all of you!
New to Kickstarter?
If you’re new to Kickstarter and all this is uncharted territory for you, my goal is to make this as enjoyable an experience as possible for you especially! With Kickstarter, you are not buying a thing (the thing doesn’t exist yet) you are investing in an idea. As with any kind of investment, it’s important to feel like your resources are being used wisely, and there is room for your input and feedback within the framework of the product’s continued development. This is the purpose of the more interactive nature of these Campaign Updates. It gives everyone who is pledging their support an opportunity to both peek behind the curtain to assure themselves of the depth behind the project and have some personal stake in the way it gets implemented. It’s called “crowdfunding” but you are all much more than a crowd to me, you’re my partners!
What to Expect from this Campaign
Updates every two days
Community engagement is an important part of crowdfunding but I am conscious that everyone has busy lives and I want to find a solid balance between engagement and spam, especially since these are pushed to your email inboxes. I’m hoping an update every other day is a good compromise. This should result in a total of only twelve updates spread over the next three weeks. If the campaign funds successfully, we will then move to monthly updates as the project progresses through development.
I plan to keep a consistent structure to the updates so it’s nice and easy for fellow skimmers out there to jump straight to whichever parts you find interesting. These are the sections you can expect in each upcoming update:
Campaign Status
A brief statement regarding any upcoming or achieved milestones since the last update. This section will also be a catch-all for any news, unplanned livestreams or video links, etc. I’ll try to keep this section short and informative.
Component Spotlight
The is the first part of a sort of Designer’s Diary. Each update will include a slightly deeper dive into one of the components included in the game. This can include things like: what it’s made out of, how it works mechanically, or why it is there at all. A lot of thought has gone into each and every one of these components over the last two-plus years and it may be interesting reading for those of you curious about this sort of thing.
Nevermind The Theory
The other half of the Designer’s Diary. This section will explore mindfulness and meditation concepts and mechanics and discuss how they have been implemented in the game framework. For those of you familiar with meditation and mindfulness, and curious (even skeptical) about how it has been gamified, this section is for you. For those not familiar with meditation, but curious to know more of the philosophy behind it, this section may be interesting to you too. The first one of these is actually in this update below, about Beginner’s Mind.
Creating Distractions
You may have read on the campaign page that all of us are going to be designing two Distraction Packs together! This will happen here in these updates over the next three weeks while the campaign is live. This section will include posting of general design criteria and intent, requests for backer ideas and instructions for sharing them, links to polling and voting, and announcements of the poll results. If you’re a creative sort and want to have a hand in the design of the final game everyone will get, this is the section for you!
Nevermind The Theory - Beginner’s Mind
For our first deeper dive into meditation theory, I want to talk a little bit about Beginner’s Mind.
Beginner’s Mind is a phrase used a lot around meditation. The idea is that when we are first learning something new, we have a tendency to bring a sense of curiosity, wonder and a generally open mind to the experience. We are open-minded, hoping to absorb as much as we can, and we do so objectively for the most part. Andy Puddicombe of Headspace describes this as similar to wetting your finger and holding it up in the air to gauge the wind direction. There’s no real personal attachment to the outcome, you’re just… lightly curious.
With practice comes experience, maybe even expertise and wisdom, and often a decrease in curiosity. In everyday life, experience is usually a good thing. It lets us grow by virtue of learning from our mistakes, effectively improving our judgement. Meditation is a little bit different though because there is no good or bad, and no mistakes that can be made. Good, bad and mistake are judgements the mind attaches to things. Meditation is about observing, not judging. While meditating, we may witness our minds do some pretty surprising things, and judgement, even the kind that comes from experience through practice, can actually be detrimental to our objectivity. That’s why curiosity is so important.
Take for example, a new meditator who is focusing on their breath and has a random thought…
“Huh. interesting. I wonder where that came from?”
Of course, the more familiar we are with what we find when looking inward, the less curious we can become…
“Oh, THAT again?”
and the more likely we are to assign judgement.
“What’s wrong with me that I keep thinking THAT while I’m trying to meditate?”
So we have to constantly remind ourselves that in meditation, experience doesn’t necessarily make us better, practice does, and these aren’t quite the same thing. We shouldn’t assume we know what our minds are going to do or why just because we’ve seen it before any more than we should assume we know which way the wind is blowing now because we’ve checked many times before. Observing the workings of our minds with the same sense of detached curiosity as judging the wind is what we are going for.
In short, when we sit to meditate, it's important we leave our preconceptions and previous experience at the door and strive to maintain the curiosity of a Beginner’s Mind. This doesn't stop at meditating though, it's a good skill to develop for life in general.
More to Come!
Well, that’s it for Day One! Thanks for reading this far and I look forward to continuing to share this project with all of you over the course of the next three weeks!
Please share the link to this campaign with everyone you know who may enjoy being part of this project.
I’ll see you all in a couple days when we start working on collecting ideas for that last Abstract Series Distraction Pack!
Cheers!
-AJ