
Agency, Storytelling, and Play: A Conversation with Cole Wehrle
From Decision Space by Jacob Frydman, Brendan Hansen, Pete Wissinger, Paul Salomon
May 20, 2026 · 1h 30m · Episode 270
About this episode
Pete chats with Cole Wehrle about player agency, storytelling in games, and the challenges of designing long, heavy games.
Episode 266- Storytelling with Cole Wehrle Big day here for Pete. In this episode he chats one on one with Cole Wehrle from Buried Giant Studios. They talk a lot about player agency, emergent storytelling, and what it's like the make and play long, heavy games. Timestamps 1:00- how Cole thinks about making games18:45- storytelling in games40:00- long heavy games49:30- agency and fairness59:20- fun1:04:30- learning rules1:14:00- designing historical games Games Mentioned Oath, Root, Arcs, John Company Preplanners Next week we are doing a deep dive on Bus! Music and Sound Credits Thank you to Hembree for our intro and outro music from their song Reach Out. You can listen to the full song on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQuuRPfOyMw&list=TLGGFNH7VEDPgwgyNTA4MjAyMQ&t=3s You can find more information about Hembree at https://www.hembreemusic.com/. Thank you to Flash Floods for use of their song Palm of Your Hand as a sting from their album Halfway to Anywhere: https://open.spotify.com/album/2fE6LrqzNDKPYWyS5evh3K?si=CCjdAGmeSnOOEui6aV3_nA Intermission Music:music elevator ext part 1/3 by Jay_You -- https://freesound.org/s/467243/ -- License: Attribution 4.0…
People in this episode
Host: Pete
Guest: Cole Wehrle
Topics covered
- player agency
- emergent storytelling
- game design
- long heavy games
- historical games
Keywords
- storytelling
- game design
- player agency
- emergent gameplay
- historical games
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Buried Giant Studios
Products: Oath, Root, Arcs, John Company
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