In both pieces, the readers or viewers are given agency to understand and gain perspective on the story through their interpretive decisions: about which threads are most interesting to follow, and about how to piece together the events they witness into a meaningful whole.

Certainly interactors can create aspects of digital stories in all these formats, with the greatest degree of creative authorship being over those environments that reflect the least amount of prescripting. But interactors can only act within the possibilities that have been established by the writing and programming. They may build simulated cities, try out combat strategies, trace a unique path through a labyrinthine web, or even prevent a murder, but unless the imaginary world is nothing more than a costume trunk of empty avatars, all of the interactor's possible performances will have been called into being by the originating author.

In a square dance we perform whatever steps the caller announces because the repertoire of possible movements and the rules of combination are known to both parties before the music starts, and though everyone does not have to do exactly the same thing at the same time, all the square dancers do have to be part of a single overall pattern. Folk dancing in ballroom style offers a model of freer participation. In the Cajun two-step or the Brazilian samba, for instance, all the dancers share a repertoire of movements, and each set of partners has license to invent its own combinations and interpretations of these movements. Like jazz musicians, the dancers can improvise their own satisfying creations from these given elements. But the greater individual freedom in ballroom-style folk dancing means that the group as a whole has less coherence than at a square dance.