I understand his emphasis on evocative prose - even if I mildly disagree. In the link
@Avi gave, it looks like what Lynch wants is to set up the ref to set up the players to "have some kind of feeling." I care little for this. I want the ref and the players to have fun playing a game solving puzzles and reaching goals. Watch a movie or read a book to "have a feeling." Just MHO.
I think you are over-stating what evocative is...perhaps based on some past bad experience with a story-teller DM? It's not that.
In it's simplest form it's good adjectives. Powerful word choice. A well crafted sentence can evoke, a weak one will leave you feeling flat (e.g. "
The room is large 30 feet by 60 feet...").
Why do we want to evoke? Because it puts both the player and the DM in the right mindset. They both mentally regurgitate past imagery and paint the scene in their minds (
differently!...but close enough). If you don't evoke, and you want to fill out a scene with some detail...it's going to end up being a wall-of-text. Zzzzz....
There is an analogy in art/illustration. You hint as forms and make the viewers mind complete the image. That's the jedi-master way to paint. The sophmoric way is to zoom down in Photoshop to an infinite level-of-detail and fill everything in hyper-realistically (the way a computer does). The freshman way is to use stick figures.
I think you (and I) both want our players to "have a feeling", but just not in with the negative connotations of "story time". We do want our players anxious or scared when the poking through ancient ruins. We want them to have a sense of wonder when they find something amazing/unusual. We'd like them to possibly panic when they are being chased out of the dungeon. That's the sort of subtle emotional manipulations I think a good DM strives for. Evocative language when describing a setting can help.
So what is interactivity? As opposed to what?
Beoric nailed that. Basically an inert environment w/ combat.
And then what is design? From
@squeen 's post it sounds like just designing something cool and making it playable? Yes?
Perhaps it's easiest to understand design by the lack of it. It's a fun-house dungeon, random monster placement. A
red dragon in a 20x20 room right down the hall from 100
orcs usually equals poor Design.
I think Hawk's
Bottomless pit of Zorth is a wonderful modern example of good design.