I have written on the process of writing Mere Anarchy on my blog, now that Spring Thing is over. If you have played Mere Anarchy, I would love to hear from you still!
Thanks for writing a post-mortem. I enjoyed Mere Anarchy and it was interesting to read about your process. I second the effectiveness of the variegation–to see the tools I had chosen in action was rewarding. The paragraph about “standards of interaction” and being surprised by player reactions was especially interesting, and spoke to my experience playing narrative games in general. If a story has momentum, I don’t mind riding the rails for a bit, especially if the game earns it with more involved interactions in other scenes. That balance plays into pacing, too, and the pacing in Mere Anarchy is good. At the risk of stating the totally obvious: poking around in Pulpit’s shop feels appropriate while poking around in the townhouse does not; it makes sense that you can linger at Pulpit’s while the choices at the townhouse are all mission-centric. Anyway! Thanks again for writing.