What Hasbro’s Pie Face tells us about the future of fun

When K.C. Miller got her seven grandchildren together for the holidays, things got a little messy in the kitchen.

They weren't cooking some elaborate recipe: They were playing Pie Face, a game in which a dollop of whipped cream is served up from a plastic 'throwing arm” to someone who has positioned his face in its path. As everyone tried to remain stoic while getting bopped with a white blob, Miller took photos and videos on her iPhone.

'We'd play these videos and we'd just howl at how funny they were,” said Miller of Gilbert, Ariz. And then she posted some of them on Facebook, wanting to share the high-jinks with others.

Pie Face, made by Hasbro, was the single best-selling item in the games category in 2016 and the fourth best-selling toy overall, according to market research business NPD Group.

And Miller was hardly alone in sharing her family's laughs online - Hasbro's customer research found that more than 50 percent of people who buy Pie Face make and share a video of themselves playing it.

Pie Face is a symbol of a new era in toymaking, one in which social media is allowing the industry to marshal you, the everyday shopper, to become a product's most powerful advertiser. And its mega-popularity has helped fuel a flurry of action from toymakers to create games that offer a 'shareable moment” - a brief visual morsel that parents and grandparents will post on Instagram or Facebook and that teens will put on Snapchat or YouTube.

It's a new breed of toy that can't just be fun for players in real time. It has to be demonstrative. Performative, even.

The desire to strike social gold is shaping the game business in a variety of ways - toymakers are mining viral social clips for inspiration for new products. They are scrambling to crank out new games faster than ever to ride digital waves before they crest.

And they are approaching their marketing campaigns differently, knowing that your shared clips might do a fair amount of the lifting.

Pie Face, in fact, first came on Hasbro's radar thanks to social sharing. In 2015, the team there spotted a viral clip of a grandfather and grandson playing the game, which originally was produced in limited numbers by a small company in Britain. Hasbro moved aggressively to buy the rights to manufacture and distribute the game.

Other companies, too, are looking to social phenomena for cues. This summer, Buffalo Games and Puzzles is set to release a game called Flip Tricks, a riff on the cadre of 'bottle flip challenge” videos that have sprung up on YouTube. In the clips, people toss plastic bottles in the air, trying to make them somersault midflight but land right side up.

Flip Tricks attempts to codify the phenomenon a bit, providing more durable bottles and spelling out head-to-head or solo challenges.

'If something's already gone viral, and you're building a product around that, then you already have this built-in marketing that is stronger than any traditional advertising,” said Ben Jamesson, a vice president at Buffalo Games.

Social trends go boom and bust at warp speed, and so toymakers say that they have to move at a breakneck pace to capitalize on them. Such was the case with Speak Out, another Hasbro creation. In this game, players wear a mouthguard-like plastic mold that stretches their faces to look cartoonish and makes it hard to talk. Players must say a phrase to a partner and get them to guess their garbled words.

Hasbro typically takes 12 to 18 months to conceptualize and manufacture a game from scratch. With Speak Out, the process was compressed to 11 weeks. The idea for it was sparked by Web videos of people putting in dental mouthpieces and getting the giggles when they tried to speak clearly, and Hasbro didn't want to be late to the social-sharing party.

'Everything has changed. The mind-set is the biggest thing - we have to act like entrepreneurs,” said Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice president of Hasbro Gaming. 'We just have to run when we see an opportunity.”