Die! Die! Die! beneath the trees of Albert Park (Photo: Connor Crawford Photography).

Pop CultureJanuary 30, 2018

Laneway Festival 2018: Auckland at its best

Contributing Writer

Die! Die! Die! beneath the trees of Albert Park (Photo: Connor Crawford Photography).

Thousands came to celebrate Auckland’s anniversary at Laneway Festival in a sun soaked Albert Park. Simon Day shares his favourite memories of a very good (and very hot) day.

There are times when Auckland feels quaint, backwards even, far from its “world class” aspirations. It’s usually when you’re sitting in traffic, in the rain. Then there are days when it feels like the greatest city in the world, a place you feel lucky to live in, a city you’re proud to call home. Yesterday, at Laneway Festival in Albert Park, was one of those days. The venue is an urban wonderland with stages set beneath the canopy of the park’s trees, probably the best inner city venue I’ve been to. The music was vast and fantastic, and local musicians held their own with the world’s best artists. The vibe and the crowd was full of love.

It was a perfect day. But fuck it was hot.

The Laneway vibes featuring Mac DeMarco (Photo: Connor Crawford photography).

The access the public has to the prime minister in New Zealand is the essence of our country – I’ve talked to John Key about cricket as we walked around La Cigale market, for example. Jacinda Ardern is more at home at music festival, having famously DJed Laneway in 2014, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was the first person I bumped into after heading through the gates. The crowd was initially stunned to see the PM, her partner Clarke Gayford, and her three suited security guards strolling through Albert Park, but people were soon excited to learn they were allowed to take selfies and talk to her about both policy and pregnancy.

It must be tough being one of those first acts in the early afternoon when the crowd’s sparse and everyone’s still getting a feel for the day. But it always helps when the prime minister is your opening act. Not officially listed on the programme this year, a crowd of a few when Jacinda Ardern started her speech quickly became a crowd of hundreds as people realised what was going on.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with D. D Dumbo and band (Photo: supplied).

“My name is Jacinda, and usually I am here as a ticket holder. Once I was here as a DJ. That was indeed the pinnacle of my career, it was all downhill from there. But eventually I will return to do weddings and bar mitzvahs,” the prime minister said as she opened the festival.

“To all of you for continuing to come and show support for live music, please never give up on the importance of supporting creatives and artists live. It is so so important that we don’t just revert to hearing everything on the internet or the radio. This is the fuel for the creative machine to get that live feedback from all of you. So keep supporting music live.”

And with that, the prime minister introduced D. D Dumbo, Australian Silver Scroll winner and singer, featuring his band full of bass clarinets, trumpets and flutes, and Laneway 2018 had begun.

An early afternoon session with Melowdownz (Photo: Connor Crawford).

Hip-hop can be such a hard act to pull off live if you’re not a megastar with that Drake money to put together a gargantuan stage show, but West Auckland rapper Melodownz and his band were full of energy and soul to start the day. I’m always struck with gratitude when someone tells me they’ve read one of my stories – and it must be an amazing feeling to have a crowd rap your lyrics back to you.

Shiny Joe Ryan of Pond (L) and Billie Eilish (who’s just 16!) (Photos: David Watson)

The intricate chess match of festival stage maneuvering always involves sacrifice. There was such a deep line up of talent yesterday, I inevitably missed acts I was desperate to see (and I still haven’t seen Aldous Harding live!). But when you commit to an artist you’ve got to stay to the end. With such short sets it’s all about building to the finale. If I’d left Billie Eilish when my friends gathered across the park I would have missed her delicately cover ‘Hotline Bling’, then demand a mosh pit, and close with ‘Ocean Eyes’, the track that smashed down the door for the endlessly talented 16-year-old when she uploaded it to SoundCloud in 2015. It’s still swimming around in my brain today.

Father John Misty (Photo: Connor Crawford).

You know you’re having sound troubles when your keyboard falls off its stand onto the stage and you have to use duct tape to hold it down. There were some major technical issues for The Internet, but the band shelved their frustration as they lead us on a funked up trip through the late afternoon. While Matt Martian’s keyboard was put back in place with some Kiwi ingenuity, he took the chance to be front of stage and party with the crowd. The hidden heroes of the festival are the roadies (are they even called that?) and sound technicians who suddenly appear to put instruments back together, reattach microphone receivers, set one band up then pull it all down again with a tiny window of time.

Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals (Photo: David Watson).

I haven’t been at the very front of a big gig for a long time. But Anderson .Paak and the Free Nationals were worth investing 45 minutes of waiting to get some prime real estate. It was a rollercoaster of RnB, punk mosh pits, jazz, and hip-hop. He’s an incredible front man, though why he was wearing a long-sleeved jumper I will never know. The crowd was in the palm of his hand as he bounced around the stage, onto the drums, and back to gyrate with the microphone. We walked away drenched in sweat, smiling at strangers who had shared in that moment. Where we were going we didn’t quite know.

TOKiMONSTA (Photo: David Watson).

As the sun went down, the final two hours became a bit blurry. I had my notepad but no pen. A phone with no battery. The music seemed louder in the dark. We drifted around the four stages, each a unique end to the day. TOKiMONSTA’s journey from classical pianist to dark and stormy beat maker is one of my favourite artist stories. Surgery to treat a potentially fatal brain disease left her unable to speak or hear music. She got both abilities back. We waited for Anderson .Paak to appear to perform his guest verses. He never did, but it didn’t matter as her psychedelic beats pounded down the tunnel of trees.

The density of Bonobo’s electronic dance music becomes so clear when played with a live band. Its layers are intricate and at the centre of the stage Bonobo himself – moving between a drum machine and computer and keyboard – is like a chef pulling together all the final elements of a dish.

It was about now that people were starting to dance with their eyes closed.

The War On Drugs (Photo: Connor Crawford).

The moon hung huge right above the stage for the day’s rock finale of The War on Drugs, and the university’s beautiful clock tower glowed blue under lights. We were in the back row and the view down to the Princes Street stage was perfect. The band sounded so crisp and clear. Earlier in the day, their album A Deeper Understanding won a Grammy for Best Rock Album. They deserved to close out the festival on the main stage.

Suddenly, far too quickly, it was over. The music finished. Sunburnt and exhausted but glowing, Auckland floated out into the streets of the city and into a 3.2x Uber surge.

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The kids game that… actually teaches you? The switcheroo that is Zoombinis.

Pop CultureJanuary 29, 2018

When kids play the darnedest (and secretly educational) things

Uther Dean

Guest writer

The kids game that… actually teaches you? The switcheroo that is Zoombinis.

Uther Dean reminisces about how kids’ games were used to trick him into enjoying his education – and how those games still hold up today.

Do you remember the days of the old school yard? We used to laugh a lot. Well, people used to laugh a lot. I don’t know about you but I certainly wasn’t in the school yard. I was laughing, yes, but I was far from the dangers that populate the schoolyard: the bruising bark-chips, the sharp grass, the physical movement. I was inside learning like a chump.

Let me be clear: I did not know I was learning. I thought I was having fun. One of the eternal betrayals of schooling is its addiction to the secretion of learning (a not fun thing) within fun (definitionally a fun thing). Sometimes it was as simple as songs (fun) that taught us about numbers (not fun). Sometimes it was much more complicated. Which brings me back to why I don’t remember the days of the old school yard. I was playing video games (fun OR SO I THOUGHT).

The class had a couple of computers and we were allowed to use during breaks but only on approved programmes. When I first saw there was a game on the list of approved programmes, I was sure some mistake had been made. They wouldn’t just let us play The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, would they? But it was on the list and I was more than ready and willing to abuse this seemingly oversight. Even when I was only a few years into primary schooling I was on my hustle. Little did I know, I was the one who was being hustled.

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, circa your childhood.

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (more recently re-mastered re-released as just Zoombinis; you can get it on Steam) is a thrilling game where you guide blue little creatures (the Zoombinis, obv) through a series of challenges to help them find a new home. You have to cook a squat troll a pizza, you have to trick some of the tall, edgy Fleens to attack themselves with bees, you have to sit on a raft in the right order. You know, standard video game levels.

Playing it again as an adult, I can see that Zombinis’ masterstroke is the character creation option. You move the Zoombinis in groups of 16 and each time you start out with a new group (you win the game when 625 Zoombinis make it to their new home, something I’d suspect very few people have achieved), you can design each and every one of your charges.

The character design may seem shallow by the standards of today’s pixel-perfect self-replicators but the five options each for hair, eyes, nose colour and feet are the precise right amount for you to build your own little cast of characters – each with their own distinct attitude and personality. You care about your Zoombinis, you’ll do whatever it takes to get them to their new home. This was true was true in 1996, playing it when I was six or seven, and it was true in 2017, playing it when I was 30.

I cared and I engaged. Which is what made The Logical Journey of Zoombinis’ betrayal all the more painful. It slowly dawned as I filled my school breaks with Zoombanity that something didn’t seem quite right. Days had passed and it was still on the list of approved programmes. And something strange was happening. I was becoming more logical.

I could decode patterns in the world much better. I started to be able to figure out how things could relate without being explicitly connected. This was odd. We hadn’t talked about this at school. It was just happening to me.

My first thought was that I was a genius. That is always my first thought.

My second thought is always that I am definitely not a genius.

Then I remembered the Zoombinis. I remembered how I would work out which of the two sneezing bridges to send my Zoombinis over (one was allergic to blue noses, the other allergic to everything else). Then… I remembered the name of the game. The LOGICAL Journey of the Zoombinis.

I’d been had. I’d been playing a game (fun) but learning (not fun), but it didn’t feel like I’d been learning (so it hadn’t been not fun). I have struggled with trust issues ever since.

But that didn’t stop me playing the game. I wanted to get all those Zoombinis safe. All 625 of them. It took a hell of a lot of lunchtimes, but I did it. All of my wards with their little noses and their little lives got to their new home. Yeah, I learned, but that wasn’t the point, that was a by-product. I didn’t like it, but I loved the Zoombinis so I beared with it.

Which was going to be the final point of this piece: that what makes learning games successful is that they have to be good enough games to hide the learning. The spoonful of sugar has to be sweet enough. That the secret of that lies not in mind blowing graphics or physics or explosions, but in allowing people to buy into the characters.

In short, Zoombinis are the best educational part of Zoombinis because you love them enough to learn.

That was going to be my final line. But then something happened.

I couldn’t stop playing Zoombinis. I bought it just to give it another go for this thing, to remind myself of how it was. I wouldn’t spend more than hour on it.

Oh, I was a fool. How soon we forget the ones we love once they are out of our sight. Time may have robbed me of my innocence but it has not done the same to the Zoombinis. They are the same pale blue wonders they always were. The remaster has updated a lot of the graphics but hasn’t fixed what isn’t broken when it comes to character design.

The Zoombinis’ wide eyes still stare out at you, begging you to care for and understand them. Pleading with you to get them home. You make a family of Zoombinis, and then you save them. You can’t say no to that.

I was going to be here for much more than an hour.

Partly, this was because of the Zoombinis but also because it turns out that Zoombinis is still a challenge when you’re six times the age of the core audience. The learning curve is not so much painful as persistent. This is exacerbated by the dopamine-dampening insistence the game places on deliberate failure. You have to be wrong to deduce what the right pattern is.

This should make the game unsatisfying but instead it makes it compulsive. Removing the fear of failure means that you are free to try anything. The worst thing that can happen is that you lose a Zoombini or two and they can be collected from a campsite later in the game.

This makes the game mediative and calming. By understanding, the Zoombinis’ world, I was starting to understand my own better.

Which is to say: oh shit, it started teaching me again and I am a grown adult.

Turns out that good educational video games work for everyone. Or maybe I’m just stuck being six forever.

But either way I know one thing: I am getting all my damn Zoombinis home.

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