Animal Crossing: New Horizons was originally intended to be a simple video game. A series of bizarre coincidences led to it becoming a cultural phenomenon as well as a historical record of the first few months of a global pandemic. It shouldn't come as a surprise that many of us have conflicting feelings about it.

Granted, many of those emotions are positive, as Animal Crossing served as a lifeline for many of us during a time when we were experiencing significant difficulties — an oasis in a vast desert of difficulties. When we compared ourselves to other people playing the game, those positive feelings were accompanied by a massive dose of FOMO (fear of missing out), as well as concerns that we were somehow wasting time or playing the game incorrectly by either bingeing on it or not playing enough to keep up.

The release of the massive 2.0 update, as well as the Happy Home Paradise DLC, has prompted many of us to return to a game that we had abandoned for months, or that we may have associated with feelings of loneliness, When You Get A 5 Star Island In Animal Crossing. despondency, and anxiety — and we're wondering how to get back into the game without feeling weird about it, or playing it in an unhealthy way.

The good news is that it is possible. I spoke with two psychologists from Take This, a non-profit mental health organization that specializes in serving the gaming community, to find out how I (and you!) can ease back into the gaming world again.

In fact, my two interviewees — Dr. Rachel Kowert, the Research Director of Take This, and Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo, the Clinical Director of Take This ("better known as Dr. B for long Italian name reasons," he tells me) — are both gamers, and they've both logged a lot of hours in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Dr. B has 240 hours, and Dr. Kowert has "pushing a hundred," despiteWho better to speak with about the strangeness of returning to a game that has been linked to so many strange memories than the creators themselves?