Tennyson Stead: Game Developer, Screenwriter, & Narrative Designer

As a game developer, screenwriter, and narrative designer, Tennyson Stead has spent more than two decades building worlds that teach collaboration. Through projects like Jump Rangers, he explores how story, performance, and design shape the ways people think and work together. In this conversation, he reflects on what must stay unseen in worldbuilding, character, and the systems that hold stories and teams together.

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In worldbuilding, what has to stay unseen for the story to feel real?

In the end, it all comes down to the medium you're working with. On stage and screen, great stories are built on the efforts of our characters to achieve overwhelmingly challenging goals - because it's those efforts that people are watching. If we understand our own worldbuilding, then the manner in which our characters go about their business and the ways in which those actions affect the world around them will reveal all kinds of highly specific details... but those details exist in the subtext, and we shouldn't push them at the audience.

In a game, the player is the one moving the narrative forward. Anything that might affect how they do what they're doing could be necessary information, but we need to give them that information in a way that makes sense for the character they're playing. Any other information you might have about the world can certainly influence how things work in the world around them, but we shouldn't go out of our way to present that information to the player directly.

How do you decide which parts of a character's motivation to reveal and which to let the audience sense on their own?

Motivation speaks for itself. If a character's goal is challenging enough, your audience knows they're only putting themselves through the crucible of it all because they care so much. If a character needs to explain or justify their actions, then they might wind up sharing their motivations with the audience... but that's a natural product of the story, and not something the writer should be pushing for.

Games depend on systems players don't notice. What's the trick to making structure felt without making it obvious?

Two things contribute to making a gaming system feel natural. First of all, is it a healthy, constructive, and rewarding activity for your brain to be practicing? Secondly, does whatever the player is doing feel like a reasonable extension of the world of the game? If you're creating good things for people to play with, and if that play feels like part of the fantasy, then I won't say that the gameplay systems disappear... but they enhance the experience, instead of getting in the way.

What part of storytelling do most writers or designers overlook because it's working quietly in the background?

Always, it's the value of the people working alongside us. Most of the screenplays floating around in Hollywood are actually pretty well-written. When they don't get produced, it's because they're asking the actors to sell a story to the audience instead of empowering actors in their performances. In game development, I'd say that the thing people overlook the most is the ways in which different disciplines work together to create a sense of play. Making gameplay isn't about having one great idea, so much as it's about how all the great ideas work together.

When collaboration works well, it almost disappears. What's the hidden force that keeps creative teams moving in sync?

Great leaders do work that empowers the people around them. If we're assembling a team of amazing artists just to pull an idea out of one person's head and flesh it out, we're wasting the imaginations of everyone but the so-called genius sitting at the epicenter of that process. Creating space for everyone to do their best work is how we get amazing collaborations.

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When Tennyson talks about story, he isn’t describing a blueprint. He’s describing a network of people, choices, and systems that support one another. For him, design isn’t control. It’s how we make space for everyone else to do their best work.

Learn more about Tennyson at:

• Linktree

• Jump Rangers on Ko-fi

• Screenwriting Channel on YouTube