Jenna Caravello is an LA-based multidisciplinary artist focusing on animation, video games, and installation.
Jenna Caravello is an artist who thinks very carefully about how people physically and emotionally interact with digital worlds. During her talk, it was clear that interactivity is an important way to communicate feeling. She pays attention to how the body is involved, whether the player is sitting, standing, holding something, or moving through space.
One of the projects she shared was Amber Row, a game tackling the theme grief. The project uses the idea of collection in video games and turns it into a metaphor for mourning. As the player moves through the world, they collect scattered memories of a previous avatar. Collecting these objects changes the player’s body, and returning them to NPCs slowly causes the world to fall apart.
What struck me most was how the game avoids traditional ideas of reward. There’s no score or clear win condition, and instead of feeling progress, the player feels fatigue. The more you engage with the system, the more draining it becomes. That shift made the mechanics themselves feel emotional rather than neutral. Grinding, which usually keeps players hooked, becomes exhausting in the same way grief is.