Stephen Larsen (2005)

Since his days as a JMPS student, Stephen Larsen, Class of 2005, has been intrigued by game design. Last year he launched an independent video game studio, Kintsugi Interactive, along with four other game developers, in Los Angeles.

“Kintsugi is a game studio focused on making meaningful game experiences that challenge people to be better humans,” Larsen explains. 

Part of the inspiration for this is the art of kintsugi, the Japanese craft of taking broken ceramics and pottery and using a golden lacquer to seal it. 

“What I love about the philosophy behind kintsugi is that what makes you broken is actually beautiful,” Larsen says. “It doesn’t try to distract from the brokenness but to highlight it, and it still creates a beautiful picture.”

Kintsugi’s first game, Icopult, is a destruction puzzle game in an urban fantasy world set in the fictional city of Los Cerberos.

“In the game, you’re a demolitions expert tasked with demolishing buildings, but as you do your rent starts to increase, the client having you destroy these buildings isn’t being completely honest, and people are protesting. There’s a not-too-thinly veiled allegory of the housing crisis,” Larsen says.

Icopult takes influence from Angry Birds. Although Angry Birds is not one of Larsen’s favorite games, he says that “its use of physics as a puzzle device is really brilliant.”

In Icopult, players use an icosahedron, a 20-sided die, to destroy the houses. Game mechanics include magic runes that you craft and put on the 20 sides of your icosahedron, which affects how the icosahedron performs as it interacts with different materials.

This is an illustration of what Larsen believes about games: “They’re a beautiful marriage of math, science, and art.” 

Larsen breathes video games. When he’s not working at Kintsugi, he teaches animation and 3D game development at Exceptional Minds Professional Training Academy and Studio. His students are post-high school adults on the autism spectrum. Here he runs game develpoment, leading his students in the production of a small couch multiplayer-game.

He loves his work, but he hopes to eventually go full-time with Kintsugi Interactive. 

A Winding Path to Video Games

Larsen’s pathway to video games has included work in graphic design, UX design, and video game production, and even as a background actor for a few Hallmark movies.

From his early days, he’s always liked art, math, and science. Still, Larsen says he’s more artist than engineer or mathematician. M.C. Escher was his favorite artist growing up.

Despite his early interest in video game design, one of Larsen’s uncles advised him against going into video game design, because “people who make video games, all they do is play video games.” 

At first Larsen followed his uncle’s advice. But after a string of different colleges, he found himself studying animation as a junior at Utah Valley University, completing an animated short video and a video game project.

“This is when I realized I loved game development,” Larsen says. “I thought, ‘this is the coolest thing ever. I want to do game design.’ It happened at a time when I was in an awful disagreement with my best friend. I felt like a shadow of myself, and the only time I ever really felt like myself was when I was working on stuff for the game.”

In 2015 he attended his first Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

“When I walked into the Moscone Center, it was like this wave of belonging and purpose came over me, and I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do. I don’t care how much it pays, it wasn’t about money for me.”

Before moving to L.A. Larsen worked as a graphic designer, a User Interface (UI) designer for CleanTelligent, and a User Experience (UX) designer for Trideum, an aerospace defense government contractor, in Huntsville, Alabama. 

But working for a government contractor was a “creativity siphon.”

“I was tired of doing design,” Larsen says. “I’m really good at it, but all the time I spent on it was always taking me further away from games.”

And he wanted to live somewhere “weirder.”

One day a voice inside him prompted him to move to L.A. and pursue his passion. Soon after, he put in his notice and took the leap.

Video Games as a Storytelling Medium

Larsen loves video games because he finds them to be a more powerful storytelling device than film, television, or serialized content. 

This is because games make the audience a participant in the stories. 

“The Last of Us TV show is great,” Larsen says. “In some ways the show is better than the video game, but the core theme, the big philosophical question, is the trolley test. If you push the button, the trolley will kill one person instead of this crowd of people. But the question is, what if it’s your kid?

“The show asks us to empathize with the person who chooses to save their kid. The game does that in a way that is way more impactful and powerful than the show…In the game it’s not Joe pulling the trigger; it’s you pulling the trigger. It’s because of situations like that that I love games.”

JMPS Experience

Larsen says he looks back positively on his JMPS experience. 

He remembers that despite the school having a more traditional and conservative reputation the message he got about politics was: “‘Don’t listen to news that you agree with; listen to stuff that you don’t agree with and get a well-rounded experience. Be able to make that argument for the other side.’

“Mr. Sheaffer was definitely one of the most influential teachers for me in how I perceive and choose to interact with the world,” Larsen says. “I really enjoyed how he challenged me and taught me a lot.” 

Sheaffer’s Classics & Political Science class is especially memorable to Larsen. 

“I was just talking to Josh Thomas (Class of 2006),” Larsen says. “We still always call each other ‘comrade’ because we read The Communist Manifesto with Sheaffer. His classes stand out, because Mr. Sheaffer’s love of history is infectious. The way he engaged the classroom and inspired us is something that just really sticks with me after all these years.”

Another influential teacher for Larsen was Mr. Batchelder, who taught Larsen Values & Ethics. 

“I remember some conversations with Mr. Batchelder on my senior trip that were really influential. He recognized what was probably just being taught to me and not my actual experience, and he invited me to form my own opinion and not just repeat what had been told to me. That was something that I really appreciated.”

Larsen was also involved in drama, clubs, choir, and student government. He appreciates that there are so many opportunities to get involved at JMPS. 

Larsen particularly liked student government, saying, “It helped me see how the world works in real life.”

Larsen attended JMPS along with his sister Ashley (Class of 2006), who lives in Indianapolis with her wife, and Ben (Class of 2010), who now lives in Seattle with his family.

More about Video Games, Game Development, and the Industry

When asked to explain exactly what a game developer is, Larsen says: “A game developer can mean many different things. A more casual definition of a game developer is anyone working on the game. But this could include a level designer, mechanics designer, concept artist, environment artist, 3D artist, technical artist, gameplay engineer, or combat engineer. It takes many different roles to make a game.”

He quotes Jason Schreier, who wrote the book Of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: “Making a game is like making a movie, but you’re inventing the camera at the same time you’re shooting the movie.” 

Larsen is a producer at Kintsugi Interactive and the creative director for Icopult. His role is to look at the whole spectrum of the project, identify what needs to be done, and find solutions to overcome blocks.

Because game-making is so complex and so much can go wrong in video game production, Larsen plans to keep Icopult small.

Larsen confirms that the video game industry is very cutthroat, citing the thousands of layoffs of game developers, such as Microsoft cutting 8% of its game developers last year after acquiring Blizzard, another video game company.

“Games are more lucrative than the movie and music industries combined, so the game industry attracts investors,” Larsen says. “Many investors don’t understand how games are made. It’s a slow process and investors are impatient. Companies can afford to hold onto their staff, but they don’t want to lose investors, and they’re looking for ways to increase shareholder value.”

That’s why Larsen has decided to start his own production company. 

“I’m not going to wait on Nintendo to give me permission to do what I love doing,” he says. “I’m not going to wait on Blizzard to give me permission to start my career…I can make better games than what these other companies are making, because they’re making games for money. I’m making games for joy.”