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I just wanted to expand on my reply since this is an interesting topic.
First, it's clear that what's fun differs dramatically from person to person. It is rarely to never possible to accurately say "Design X isn't fun" or "Design X is fun" without the added implication that what you're really saying is, "It's fun/not fun for person/group Y."
Choice is fun to some people. Many people (myself included) adored Morrowind in the single player realm because of the relatively expansive range of choice the developers chose to grant the players. On the other hand, one of the most successful arcade games of the 80s was Dragon's Lair, in which your -only- choice was which way to press the joystick, and if you didn't do it in precisely the right order and with the right timing, your game was over. A completely linear game that forces you to do things in exactly one way, but which was fun to many, many people.
To say that increasing the range of choices is an inherently good thing in terms of pleasing an ever-widening range of people is a viewpoint that doesn't seem to hold up under the light of reality. Indeed, the games that probably have the most choice (heavy roleplaying games with as little hardcode as possible) also appeal to very very few people. That's not to say that kind of game design isn't fun; just that it's not fun to most people.
But on the other hand, look at the most popular PC game ever: The Sims. Fairly free-form and provides lots of choice, though with certain major areas of typical gameplay totally cut off (killing for instance).
In summary, what choice does is create wider gameplay possibilities. This, however, has little, inherently, to do with fun. Many gamers do not want a ton of options thrown at them: They want a directed, focused experience. In the MUD arena, it's the Lineage philosophy vs. the Ultima Online philosophy. Ultima Online throws tons of choices at you. Lineage throws very few. Lineage, on the other hand, was an order of magnitude more popular.
--matt
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