Relationship Games – Jump Starting Relationships Since 2010
Hello and welcome to the Relationship Games blog!
To celebrate our new blog, I thought it would best to start from the very beginning of how Relationship Games came about. Relationship Games was founded 2010 and from the very beginning its been much more for its founders than a company. We have an ambitious goal of providing concrete value to our players by helping everyone improve their romantic relationship. We do this by pushing some of the boundaries that we’ve established in our relationships, by deepening the understanding of our spouses and providing easy to apply real world tools for making our relationships better. These are things that we all know, but might be hard pressed to turn them into action without little outside stimulus.
All this playing started from my very own relationship. I founded Relationship Games together with my husband Timo Railo, whom we have a child together and another child half time from Timo’s previous relationship. After our daughter was born almost six years ago, I returned back to work, and was faced with harsh reality of combining roles of a mother, career woman and a spouse. My top priorities were my daughter and my career, so little time was left for my husband. We were taking good care of our daughter and organizing family time schedule, but we forgot to schedule time for two of us. At that times couples we knew also divorced, whom we thought would have stayed together forever.
My husband and I had been playing a social reality sports game, which his digital media agency Alkuvoima East had developed for its customer. From this game, we got an idea to boost romantic relationship using some of the same mechanics. We started brainstorming different relationship missions and game mechanisms in the evenings after our little girl had gone to bed and we created little surprises for each other based on the game missions. Sometimes we’d eat strawberries and drink champagne without any other reason except our relationship and us. We managed to find some of that missing spark to our relationship once again.
I then created a small test game, using just emails and text messages, for some of our friends, who also felt the game benefited their relationships. So I knew we had an idea that could fly. And that was the beginning of another journey – the story of the Relationship Games, the world’s first real life game for couples in Facebook.
This birth story was published as a part of my interview in The NextWomen: The NextWomen Interviews Mari Parviainen, Founder & CEO Relationship Games for Couples.
I’m very grateful for all the great feedback that we have gotten from Relationship Games players so far and would like to hear even more from you. If you have found things that have improved your relationship, whatever they might be, please share them here in the comments! We try to use some of those ideas also to make the game better.
Mari Parviainen, Founder & CEO