I downloaded Animal Crossing: New Horizons on a recent Friday night and named my island Akbar, in honor of the neighborhood bar my friends and I frequented before the quarantine. One of my fellow island-dwellers, a small cat named Rudy, greeted me with a present: “This denim hat,” he told me, “is so Akbar.” How did he know?

Over the next few days, the game became a balm. Whenever the crushing tonnage of real-world news was too much, I would check into Akbar, where I could simply collect shells on the beach, watch a meteor shower or encourage a teal squirrel named Nibbles to pursue her dreams of pop superstardom. Right now, it helps to look for the little pleasures wherever you can find them, and Animal Crossing is packed full, each precious incident serving as a bite-sized mental-health break.

Slowly, the island became a digital substitution for my real life. The photo app on my phone filled up with Animal Crossing screen captures instead of events I’d actually experienced, and though my friends still couldn’t meet me at the real Akbar, they could visit my island simply by connecting their Switches to the internet. I started to worry less about the state of my real-world apartment — why bother putting my shoes away if there’s no one coming to visit — and instead found joy in rearranging the rooms of my video-game house before inviting someone to my island to behold it.

That home can be decorated by crafting new furniture or buying swatches of wallpaper from the island’s local store, though my living room is still very much a work in progress. The wall is striped yellow, the carpet is polka-dot, and most of the furniture is coated in the color of Pepto-Bismol. Transposed to real life, the room would either be eye-searingly hideous or irresistibly Instagrammable, but I love to show it off, just as I love to visit other people’s islands for company and inspiration.

After flying to my friend Karen’s island this weekend, she quickly led me to her prize possession, a bed carved into a gigantic, champagne-colored clamshell. (Has there ever been anything so luxurious?) The discovery that you could scan real-world pictures into the game unlocked a further level of customization: I built a hilltop mural of the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho holding two Oscars, while my friend Carder decorated his living room with mug shots of arrested Real Housewives.