The Future of the Story : We Have Always Loved a Good Yarn. Now That We’re Being Cyberized, How Will the Craft of Storytelling Survive?

If you were a woggle, could you make us long for a kiss?

“What’s a woggle?” you ask.

Fair question.

But now’s not the time for an answer. I don’t think it is, anyhow. And since this story is only about radical new ways to tell stories, only about the nascent medium called “interactive storytelling”--a yarn spinning process that taps new technologies to let the audience participate in the tale--it’s really not your place to muck about with the narrative flow.

So I think I’ll start with a conventional approach:

Once upon a time there were two cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. For a new breed of developers who lived there, the 1990s were the best of times, flush with energy and serious money, and the worst of times, rife with cutthroats and confusion. The Bay area, with its Silicon Valley and Multimedia Gulch, brimmed with brilliant artists and programmers who wrote computer code so dazzling that it created virtual realities and made machines do real or figurative cartwheels. Los Angeles was the center of the modern storytelling form known as the movies; it was a place crammed full of antsy people who thought the convergence of film, music, computer and communications technologies was going to let them tell their tales in revolutionary new ways.

As the first waves of new products hit the stores and theaters, the issue of what forms and “platforms” would ultimately triumph in the multimedia marketplace remained unresolved: Movie-games on CD-Rom? Cartoon novels on pay-per-view fiber-optic cable? Filmic ballads delivered by electrode to the cerebral cortex?

To some developers, though, that issue was not terribly relevant. There was, they saw, a more basic hurdle.

When Nicolas Negroponte founder of MIT’s Media Lab, surveys the future of media, he sees interactive storytelling as “probably the hardest piece of the puzzle. It’s a topic that most people haven’t appreciated intellectually. It’s a very deep subject.”

At least since the time of Aristotle, defining storytelling has been one of those seemingly obvious matters that send heavy thinkers into epistemological conniptions. Discussion of the topic leads quickly into an esoteric realm where simple words like story get put in quotation marks to indicate semantic suspicion. College library shelves are stuffed with books on “narratology,” and every fiction, play or screenwriting teacher at every university extension program in the country can trot out pet theories.

In his book “What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation,” Thomas M. Leitch says that narrative can be as simple as a comic strip character’s immortal line in Peanuts: “A man was born . . . he lived and he died.” Story , Leitch says, is only slightly more complicated, as illustrated by E. M. Forster’s famous example of the distinction: “The king died, and then the queen died.” The rudiments of plot , Leitch says, emerge with the element of causality or motivation: “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”

Multimedia multi-hyphenate Lisa Brenneis has been pondering such narrative issues a lot lately. “A good story,” she wrote in the cyber-insider journal Morph’s Outpost on the Digital Frontier, is like a prime number--it can’t be divided evenly. Character moves Plot. Plot embodies Theme. Theme reveals Character. Add “interactivity” to the storytelling equation, Brenneis says, as her coffee maker fills the kitchen of her Echo Park home with French Roast fumes, “and you raise the possibility of ‘combinatorial explosion’--things just get too complicated.”

Yet she remains dedicated to the idea of interactive storytelling. The career atypicality that led Brenneis to this moment is typical of the budding field: Born in Berkeley, educated at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, with some art school and classes in electronics and math thrown in. She arrived in Los Angeles in the ‘70s while touring as a bass player for the Motels. She stuck around, working on the sort of odd interactive projects (check out the laser disk diorama on the California Chaparral at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum) that are becoming bread and butter for the sort of artiste who attends Brenneis’ occasional lecture on interactivity at the American Film Institute.

An energetically hopeful skeptic, Brenneis laughs at the macho swagger of the venture capitalist hordes so eager to tap the glittery multimedia vein, and at the bluster of folks who have plunged into interactive storytelling without pausing to contemplate what is already known about its antecedents. She has coined a term for this historic moment: “the post-past, pre-future.”

*

If you’d like, of course, you can stop reading right here. But then that’s always been an option. One of the problems in discussing interactivity, you see, is that in a way it’s not really new: A cave painting was interactive in the sense that the viewer had choices about how to look at it.

You might also skim ahead now, seeking, for instance, the word woggle as if this story were digitally annotated with hypertext (those highlighted words and phrases from which computer users can, with a mouse-click, sideslip off the story line to related information elsewhere in cyberspace).

Instead, why don’t you just kick back, make your antiquated, linear thought-oriented brain comfortable, and go along for the narrative ride as our search for the elusive future of storytelling finds us driving deep into the hills above Silicon Valley.

My mission is to meet Chris Crawford, who thinks he’s got the formula for love digitized in his Mac. As I descend the iconoclastic game designer’s winding driveway, you’re riding shotgun--metaphorically the traditional place for the reader, audience, listener, viewer, whatever (please be patient, even basic nomenclature becomes problematic in talking about this stuff).

Crawford steps out to greet me, and a wild burro that he and his wife adopted lowers its head and chases a goat around a dusty corral. With “haw-heeees” ringing out over a spread that swarms with ducks and herds of free-range house cats, Crawford settles into a plastic chair on a small deck and cuts loose.

“A lot of people resent or resist the notion that you can write an equation for love,” Crawford says, “but there’s nothing heretical about it. A mathematical equation is just another form of human expression. Making a formula for human love is no different than writing a poem that expresses love, or writing music that expresses love . . . .”

At 45, Crawford’s demeanor suggests a simmering intensity held in check by the tranquillity of his chosen landscape. His gentle face is underpinned with the taut, athletic musculature of someone who has long strained to crack a hard philosophical nut. For Crawford, that would be interactive storytelling. “This is profoundly new intellectual territory . . . strange stuff, definitely,” he says, his eyes brightening a degree, his lips fluttering on the verge of a smile. “But if someone wants to get mystical and say storytelling defies human reason, I’ll object. The process can be understood.”

Crawford earned a masters in physics at the University of Missouri, then taught at a community college in Nebraska. In the late ‘70s, he headed West to mine the first major video-game boom. He dreamed up a military-strategy game called “Eastern Front” for Atari. The windfall from that and his independently developed “Balance of Power” allowed him to join Silicon Valley’s emerging digitocracy in the hills.

In the early ‘80s, Crawford says, hot designers all anticipated a monumental breakthrough into interactive art. Around 1986, though, the momentum faded, and game-making slipped into a rut. Two extremes emerged: Artistically dazzling CD-ROM-based games such as the best-selling “Seventh Guest” and “Myst”--”really impoverished interactivity,” Crawford says-- or blast-em, bash ‘em twitch games such as “Doom,” and “Mortal Kombat,” which are addictively interactive but “artistically dumb and immature.”

Crawford figured that story and character would be integral to the next big advance in game-making, he says. “But I didn’t have the faintest idea where to start. I certainly never, ever realized how difficult the problem would be.”

Twelve years after he set off on his interactive quest, Crawford figures that he has slain many of the dragons standing in the way of the narrative future. He has made progress on what he calls “artificial personality” or imbuing computerized characters with dramatically interesting behavior. Within grasp is a semi-algorithmic method of conveying human facial expression--the primary way people express emotions. He still grapples, however, with the last and most fearsome obstacle, “the language of interaction.”

Many storytellers, Crawford explains, recoil from the notion of interactivity because of their “expository prejudices . . . . The best artists want to talk, talk, talk, and never listen, listen, listen. But good interactivity is good talking and listening. A good conversation is one of the most deeply interactive human experiences there is--actually sex is better, but that’s too hard to analyze.” Most computer-game designs, Crawford says, are based “solely on the artist yakking at the audience. Myst,” for instance, “has beautiful talking,” he says. “It shows you images and displays sounds very, very well. But all you can say to “Myst” are crude grunts: ‘Go here! Go there! Do this!’ It talks in a rich, poetic language and listens in pig English, and it doesn’t think at all.”

Crawford takes me inside his home and boots up what he thinks is a big step toward the solution, his work in progress, a game called “Le Morte D’Arthur.” Writing in Pascal computer code, Crawford has provided the genes and parenting for 16 cartoon characters, each of whom can display 109 facial expressions, as well as 900 behaviors, that run in intricate cycles: assert rumor . . . attempt ambush . . . . Like non-digitized humans, each character is programmed with various values. “Mordred,” for instance, has a pride factor of 95. His gullibility is 0, his initiative 80, his volatility 15, his lust 80 and his sexiness 30.

Like a god trying to track what free will hath wrought, Crawford repeatedly turns on his program on and walks away. The program generates stories in Arthurian cyberspace as his life unfolds in real time. He then tracks the resultant story lines statistically to learn how this digitized destiny has unfolded.

Opening a three-ring binder full of numerical shorthand, he points out that on June 28, 1994, the program traipsed through 19 pages of cause and effect. To demonstrate, he flips this digital scaffolding to the place where kisses come from. See, he says, there are several ways male characters can move in for a smooch: Attempt kiss bold . . . Attempt kiss--look deep into eyes . . . Attempt kiss gentle . . . .”

Crawford pores over the printout as if reading a private investigator’s report on an errant spouse. “Here, Lancelot attempted kiss bold Elaine,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “She kissed him red hot. Lancelot attempted to make love to Elaine . . . .”

So far, in Crawford’s world, men have attempted 15 bold kisses. Women responded by spurning the kiss zero times out of 15. They shied away zero times. They teased three times. They failed to return the kiss once, kissed three times and returned the kiss with red-hot passion eight out of 15 times.

This last factoid frazzles Crawford. “There’s an obvious flaw in this,” he says. “My women are kissing red-hot too often. I’ve got to go in and change the equations to cool my women down.”

Crawford switches off the computer. “All I want to do is make genuine red-blooded interactive art,” he says. “I’ll be happy if I scratch the surface before I die.”

Taped to the computer is a note that has less to do with Lancelot’s computerized quest than with Crawford and his fellow interactive crusaders: “If you don’t pursue the Grail, who will?”

*

Will Wright boots up “SimAnt” and admires the swarm of computer-generated colonial hymenopterous insects squiggling about on the VDT. The ants’ goal, if ants can be said to have aspirations, is to colonize the user’s entire yard and then his house--all the while foraging for food, nursing larvae and avoiding the evil lawn mower.

“We stayed away from humans for a long time,” Wright says. “Ants are hard enough.”

Among the designers fiddling with narrative worlds to come, Wright and his Maxis company have taken a rather laissez-faire approach. While many designers have been busy creating frantic environments for the joystick-driven antics of Sonic Hedgehogs, Wright has entrusted all power to the user. Maxis products let people build their own on-screen cities, landscapes or farms. If a story develops, Wright observes, it’s in the user’s mind--much like what happens when kids play with plastic cowboys in a sandbox or make their Barbies waltz through a dollhouse. But now that Wright is ready to introduce humanity into his computerscapes, he finds the ant model helpful.

On the broadest level, Wright wants his next city to feature computer-generated citizens--business people, mimes, gangbangers, doctors, panhandlers. Borrowing a pen, he scratches a hasty diagram on a napkin. Underneath “homeless person,” he lists “eat,” “sleep” and “panhandle.” Then, under “sleep” he draws a “subnode” listing “find safe place,” “build cardboard shelter,” “sleep till disturbed.”

Eventually, the computer will spew out endless combinations of those activities, and an active, populated city will emerge, Wright says. But he also hopes to find a way for users to move into “higher resolution” interactivity, at least as detailed as the encounters we had earlier as we sat at a sidewalk coffee shop and flesh-and-blood people emerged from the swirl to say ‘Hi.’ ”

Wright throws up a grid of the behaviors he can generate so far. “Right now, they’re all very stupid, everything is gestural,” he says. Then he clicks on “impatient” and a stick figure taps its foot and looks at its watch: a post-past C-code arrangement awaiting actualization in an as yet ill-defined future.

*

The red woggle “wants” to play. It “thinks” about playing. It plays.

Woggle-woggle-woggle . Off it goes, futzing about on the computer screen with its blue woggle “co-star,” climbing onto cartoon pedestals and jumping off, slipping down a slide.

I sit at Stanford University’s Knowledge Systems Laboratory in underwhelmed amazement. On the face of things, these so-called “believable agents” are about as multifaceted as Pac-Man’s dumber brother. But in their as yet limited way, I’ve been told, they are the peers of Nicolas Cage and Winona Ryder. These featureless computerized creatures, says Stanford University computer scientist Barbara Hayes-Roth, may well hold the future of interactive drama in their digitized little brains.

Hayes-Roth stumbled onto the most academic pathway in the multi-branched interactive odyssey almost by accident. Fueled by Defense Department largess, Stanford emerged in the ‘60s and ‘70s as one of the three big schools--along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University--that were pioneering artificial intelligence. Hayes-Roth researched human memory at AT&T; Bell Laboratories and used computers to understand human cognition at Rand Corp. before arriving in Stanford’s Computer Science department. Now her experience is coming together, she says: “In building a model of intelligent agents, you can hardly avoid thinking about human agents.”

There are already predecessors of the cyber-thespians she envisions. Medical agent programs, for example, already lurk in computerized monitoring equipment, where researchers are testing their trustworthiness. When they’re finally wheeled into intensive care wards, they’ll be like eternally vigilant orderlies, “interpreting data, always noticing problems and recommending treatments.” Few artificial-intelligence experts have the hubris to think they can replicate a doctor, Hayes-Roth says. “But what we can do is capture an important part of a physician’s knowledge.” And she sees no reason why an actor’s knowledge should be any more difficult to pin down.

At this point, only two woggles inhabit Hayes-Roths’ computer. Two colors. Two sizes. And each has about 10 classes of verbal behavior and 10 physical behaviors, for which there are one to five variations. As we sit in a conference room a few blocks from the Stanford campus, the woggles--or “animated puppets” as Hayes-Roth calls these descendants of the original Carnegie Mellon-developed design--scurry about on a videotape of a computer screen. They jump about and shout “Yippie!” in voices supplied by Hayes-Roth’s children. But from these limited behavioral building blocks, the puppets’ repertoire of improvisational characteristics will grow, she says. She is confident that a computer-based “Virtual Theater”--a richer, more colorful expansion of the multi-user dungeons, or MUDs already popular at various Internet sites--will be on line soon. First children, then adults, will interact not only with other on-line users, but with woggles who, like computerized Pinocchios, will have minds of their own, so to speak.

Hayes Roth concedes that it may be a while before an “intelligent agent” brings Olivier’s sophistication to an all-woggle Hamlet. But she doesn’t retreat far: “Improvisational skill is a form of knowledge that actors and acting teachers have. We’re in the business of capturing knowledge. We should be able to grasp that knowledge and work with it on the computer.”

So we’ll have the actors, but where will character and plot come from?

“You can’t just write the dialogue anymore,” says Joseph Bates, a professor of Computer Science and Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon. “You can’t just write the narrative. You have to build an autonomous creature that has in it the things that used to be in the writer’s head, the animator’s head: The personality, the thought processes. The style of that creature now has to be in the creature, not in the artist.”

Imagine, Bates says, that a chess student is playing a grand master. “If the master wanted to, he could open up what seems to be an opportunity for that student, a line of attack. So the student goes in there, gets excited, thinks that for once he has a chance. Then the master shows him what he did wrong. He closes the door. The student’s emotions go down, his knowledge goes up, and the game continues.

“The point is, this master can control the emotional path of that student . . . . If you replaced the moves of the chess game with, say, the important moments of the story, and you think of the master as being the drama system in the sky, and think of the student as being the user, then, in principle, you should be able to use computerized chess technology to have a drama system that watches the user, thinks about the possible futures of the story and chooses moves that maximize the probability that the user will have a good, emotional, satisfying kind of an experience. That’s what we’re trying to do--to take that kind of technology, which is today very powerful, and adapt it to interactive storytelling.”

Which leads to the integral problem of character. “Scientists and artificial-intelligence researchers generally take the scientist in the office down the hall as the kind of human they want to simulate,” Bates says. “So they’re looking to simulate intelligence, learning, problem-solving. That’s what they want to build into their programs. But that’s not at all what makes most characters interesting. What makes characters interesting is a whole bunch of things other than what is known as intelligence: emotions, strong desires, style of personality, quirks of behavior that people find endearing or troubling.”

It’s with that in mind that Carnegie Mellon’s school of computer science collaborates with its English and drama departments. There, where the “two cultures” intersect, code writers and scriptwriters hope for a bit of artistic alchemy.

Stanford’s Hayes-Roth sums up the frontier: “We’re not talking about writing a novel or writing a film or putting on a play. We’re talking about designing an art form.”

*

In all interactive applications, there are trade-offs. One autumn afternoon, I find myself climbing into a “virtual adventure” in the cavernous Iwerks Entertainment’s offices next to the Burbank airport. Using simple narrative in theme park rides is hardly new, as evidenced by Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride or Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland. But Iwerks’ Loch Ness Expedition pushes the technological edge, letting players sit at swiveling consoles with periscopes and robotic claws while piloting a small virtual submarine through an elaborate 3-D undersea world. The participatory ride-game-film is the most viscerally stunning frontier in interactivity, I decide. It’s a blast. But for all its complex gadgetry and circuitry-- because of all that, perhaps--the tingles it sends coursing through the even-more-complex circuitry of human intelligence fade quickly. The Nessie ride is not “Moby Dick.” It’s not even “SeaQuest DSV.” Therein lies a paradox.

In a sense, the most sophisticated form of interactive storytelling is the least sophisticated. As I cruised the freeways, Infobahns, and phone lines researching this article, I carried a laptop computer loaded with several pieces of literature in a genre, (or medium, or art form ) known as hyperfiction (or E-fiction, or the interactive novel). Some hyperfictions merely allow a reader to move about in the computerized text via branching nodes. Others transform page-turners into virtual collaborations in which the user annotates text and even constructs characters. Either way, in most of the stories I encountered, the reader (here the term is accurate) travels interesting paths, through intricately defined worlds filled with characters who are perhaps as fully fleshed as your last love interest. But even though the words glow in back-lit blue and white, it’s still reading. So I’ve glossed over the highbrow subtlety of hyperfiction in favor of the more hyperbolicized Big Thing: hypermedia, it’s been called.

*

To call oneself a multimedia developer in California is about as meaningful as calling oneself a producer or writer. There are, apparently, fewer than three dozen adults in the entire state who don’t say they’re on the verge of creating the Killer Ap--the application that will capture a whole new market of computerized consumers, generating massive wealth and critical acclaim. And all these developers are eager to turn up the heat on their pipe dream.

I’ve arrived at the Brentwood home of Pamela Douglas and John Spencer via a series of random samplings and quick decisions: The couple has something called “Hollywood Blockbuster” in the works, and it strikes me that their game parallels one of this story’s themes. So here I am, in a living room that displays charts and models from Spencer’s career as an theme-park designer, listening to two disparate characters jockeying for position in what will turn out to be part pitch meeting, part lecture and part brainstorming session, energized at least in part by relationship dynamics.

“For me, the step into interactivity was completely natural,” says Douglas, a television writer who teaches screenwriting in USC’s School of Cinema-Television. “For me, it comes from a long tradition of literature.”

That tradition includes experiments by James Joyce and other novelists who have put readers into different characters’ steams of consciousness. But even those experiments may derive, Douglas says, from storytelling’s interactive roots.

Douglas asks me to conjure an ancient campfire, around which a clan kicks back and listens to its resident bard roll out the legend of a hero’s quest. “Usually the story as it comes down to us is linear--the hero embarked on a journey, and finally, at the end, found the Golden Grail or crossed the ocean or whatever,” Douglas says. “But if you take that same moment in ancient history, there may have been someone around that fire who said to the storyteller: ‘But what if instead of getting slain by the dragon, the hero looked behind a rock and found another tool?’ ”

This is the basis of the “branching story” approach that literature largely abandoned and modern video games have picked up. And now, she says, technology is about to fully liberate humanity’s interactive instincts.

For all her talk about literature, though, Douglas contends that interactive storytelling will more closely resemble episodic television.

“If a series goes for the whole year and it’s an hour drama, that’s 22 hours. You may have 300 or more continuing stories, all of which have interweaving characters. It’s immensely complex. But with CD-Rom technology, it’s possible to take all that and make it simultaneous: simultaneous plot lines ready to reveal themselves at a mouse click, simultaneous dimensions for a character. And that’s the developer’s challenge, she says. “It calls for a much higher level of discipline to chart where those possible interactions will lead you.”

In “Hollywood Blockbuster,” she and Spencer are exploring a middle ground between an intensely focused, goal-oriented linear narrative and the sort of user-created narrative free-for-all in Wright’s original SimCity. The high concept is that the player is a producer whose quest is to make a successful movie in Hollywood--which the couple compares to a mythic kingdom of castles and kings. In Blockbuster, Spencer and Douglas say, the participant enters this legendary world and follows a “yellow brick road” narrative spine through a standard three-act structure--jumping off into interactivity along the way. As a fold-out “design script” diagram shows, Act I offers opportunities to make the deal by optioning a story called “Mall Alone.” In the second act, the participant overcomes obstacles to produce the film. And Act III takes the film from exhibition to the “Acclaim Awards.” Along the way, players must learn Hollywood’s arcane rules, from jousting for position at power restaurants and making connections at charity balls to schmoozing agents and reading the trades.

This sort of character-driven “real-life fantasy adventure,” the couple believes, is the interactive future.

“When you go through life,” Spencer says, “there’s always frustration and hardship. So when you want to be entertained, you want to get away from that stuff. But you also want to reassert your power over your existence. You do that by choosing what movies you go see and what programs you watch and what sports events you go to. But once you’re there, you lose power. If, with this new technology, you can choose what to do and then, as the most powerful entity there, you can control that environment, then you’re re-empowering yourself. That is going to be very seductive.”

*

I glide down on a long escalator to the B-2 level of the San Francisco Marriott and step into a chaotic multimedia carnival of the sort that’s cropping up with growing frequency. Dozens of kiosk-mounted PCs and Macs silently spew entertainment and data as industry types attending Macromedia Inc.’s International User Conference sample the wares.

At one kiosk, people stare wide-eyed into the Resident’s CD-ROM “Freak Show.” Pulling on headphones, stepping close to the screen, they “stroll” between dimly lit carnival trailers, serenaded by chirping crickets. With a mouse click, they’re in a claustrophobic trailer, studying a fat man in boxer shorts as he watches TV wrestling. In another, they drop animated worms into a frying pan. The worms sizzle loudly, as Bible verses pop up on the screen. Nearby, people stop at the “Interactive Regional Anesthesia” kiosk to observe intricate views of human anatomy and learn everything anyone could want to know about pain.

The room strikes me as an apt symbol of the quest I’ve been charting: wild energy sparking through a weird mix of people who poke their heads into computer screens and then pull back out to scrutinize the surrounding chaos. I feel like going from person to person, grabbing their heads and looking straight into their eyes. What would I see? Desperation? Genius? Confusion?

The center of attention at the moment is Marc Canter, a big man with striped shirt and glasses, who sweats and shouts out a barker’s spiel as the monitor behind him displays the evolving work of his interactive performance group Media Band. Like a demented auctioneer, Canter faces the crowd edging in on him and points the microphone as if it were a mouse: “Whenever you see a nerd,” he bellows cryptically, “click on him!”

I figure that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing in researching this story.

All clicked out, I return to Canter. As my ocular lens zooms in, my cartoonish impression of him fades, and he comes into focus as a flesh-and-blood character, rendered in textured full color by the extraordinary technology of reality. There, in Canter’s manic smile, in his adrenaline-spiked eyes, I finally see The Truth.

Frankly, I would like nothing more than to share that truth with you, my fellow traveler. But if my quest to understand interactivity has taught me anything, it’s that definitive endings are for narrative control freaks. As a participant in this story, you, the reader, have certain rights.

So, let’s end this exploration with a collaboration:

The Truth is (pick one):

(a) Books, plays, standard-issue films? Adios, they’re history! Within three years, our lives will be inextricably linked to an infinitely complex web of utterly believable virtual narratives: Want to assist Johnnie Cochran in his closing O.J. argument? Clickity-click: You’re there! Want to play Kato in the interactive film? Clickity-click. Want to relive your life as if you’d dropped out of third grade to join the circus? Clickity-click.

(b) Like poetry, these interactive yarns tend to be more fun to make than to endure. Let’s you and me grab a few design tools, attend a couple of conferences and create our own Killer Ap.

(c) Some of the people in this story are going to get very rich. Some aren’t.

(d) The world has room for many narrative forms. Gradually, over the next few decades, stunningly sophisticated interactive forms will emerge, and the human consciousness will adapt and find them enormously satisfying.

(e) Someday, you may well lust after a Woggle. But still: A human with expressive lips and sensitive eyes will probably have the power to seduce you away from that digitized little home-wrecker.