Remember when corporate team-building meant beach volleyball at the company picnic? That was before the Information Age; now you can do team-building without getting together. At least physically.

No Mimes Media in Manhattan Beach, an interactive studio, recently designed an online team-building game for Cisco Systems’ global sales force of 21,000 employees.

It worked like this: Players of “The Hunt” were assigned to small groups with the mission of finding a treasure. Team members didn’t gather physically, but they could contact their team members through forums and chat rooms. The groups had to work together to solve puzzles involving multiple languages and complex math. Clues appeared on websites and in videos, e-mails, phone messages, and Facebook and Twitter posts.

Three teams won prizes for finding the treasure first, said Behnam Karbassi, No Mimes Media founding partner.

“The players were able to solve the mystery, get our hero safely home and recover the books that were lost – and they did it with the help of Cisco technology,” he said.

When the game ended, Cisco staged a sales meeting at 162 local offices around the world, linked via video-conferencing, and prizes were awarded.

“Nothing will replace getting together with people,” Karbassi said. “But this serves as a cost-efficient way to bring people together in a fun and entertaining way.”