Ah, then I was misunderstanding “I don’t actually think interactive fiction has to do this.” 
Well, even for a reader with gouts like mine, I’ll readily concede that I’ve read at least as much boring and awful worldbuilding as good. My fellow Tolkien imitators in particular always deserve the question “Is your world really half as interesting as you think it is?”
To join Eric in jumping to movie-dom, some of my favorite examples of great movies that became terrible franchises – The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean – went wrong because they seem to have decided that it was the mythology, the worldbuilding details, that made the first movie great and doubled down on it in the sequels. The Twilight movies are all terrible, but the terriblest are the ones that get lost in the vampire mythology and forget that at its best, this is a high school love triangle melodrama.
So yes, worldbuilding for its own sake can be deadly boring. But I think the same warning is in order with characters – yours may not be as interesting as you think they are. “Revealing character” doesn’t automatically justify a sentence. It depends on you having written an interesting character, where the revelations add up to something genuinely revelatory.
In the same way, having recognized all the terrible unoriginal worldbuilding out there, I’ll happily go to bat for almost every setting-focused digression that a Peake or a Mieville throws into their work. They do nice characters, too; but their worlds are the real feast.