While interactive narratives are often electronic, not all interactive narratives are digital and digitation does not guarantee interactivity. For example, print copies of choose your own adventure books are interactive because the reader is required to make choices and the narrative varies based on these choices. On the other hand, films are digital but not interactive because they do not require any interaction from the user to proceed once they have begun (barring a subset of films that are specifically designed to be interactive). But while interactive narratives are not necessarily digital, the interactivity of software makes it a particularly suitable media for these narratives.

Professor Wendy Chun indicated that software uses signs attached to meaning to abstract specific tasks into general processes. In other words, it is not necessary for the user to understand how a hard drive deletes a file provided that the user understands that the recycling bin signifies the process of deleting a file. The idea that software relies on its users’ knowledge of signs is related to Professor Warren Sack’s idea that computer interactivity relies on common sense. Sacks discussed this idea in a text on databases, which provide ways of organizing and accessing information. Sharon Daniel took advantage of the interactivity of databases in her interactive documentaries Blood Sugar and Public Secrets. In Public Secrets, Daniels recorded interviews with women inmates and sorted these interviews by topic. In Blood Sugar, she interviews drug users at a needle exchange program and preserved the individual interviews instead of dividing them by topic. The contrast between these two structures- dividing the interviews by topic and preserving the individual interviews- shows the creative freedom afforded by Daniels’s use of databases.

It is important to note that databases may have constraints, but they cannot verify that the data are correct; databases may require that age be represented as a non-negative integer, but they cannot verify that a given individual is actually 20 years old. Databases can also take many different forms, from traditional relational databases to a collection of hypertext. Hypertext increases interactivity, according definition given by N. Katherine Hayles, because it is any form of text that contains multiple paths and a mechanism for linking the discrete sections into a continuous path. The construction of these paths is crucial for creating narratives that are interactive.  Furthermore, since databases are not restricted to representing true information, and they come in various forms, they can also be used to create fictional narratives. For example, the choices people make in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch are stored on a Netflix database; the narrative is changed according to these stored choices, so the database plays a role in the story’s interactivity and nonlinearity.