Tag: No Mimes Media

Back to Earth Makes Its Microtransactional Debut With an ARG Short

November 30, 2018 / Michael Andersen

StarFate Corporation is in the business of making mankind a better version of itself. The company’s flagship product, the StarChip, allows its owners to record and analyze every experience they ever had, capturing details unassisted humans couldn’t dream of securing. Just implant a simple little chip into the back of your neck, and the ability to tap into the network is unlocked. It’s really a damn shame someone figured out how to hack the chips.

In the coming months,Â Back to Earth will describe what happens to the world in 2023 when presumably unhackable chips become compromised, as told through a short film, a graphic novel, and a television show in development. Our introduction to the storyworld ofÂ Back to EarthÂ starts before the cataclysm with StarFate.Tech,Â Â a short immersive experience that lets players ride shotgun with StarFate Corporation engineer Jono Walters as he investigates a train derailment that shouldn’t have been possible.

The short immersive story plays out across StarFate Corporation’s internal systems, with an unidentified assistant guiding players in unlocking Jono’s chip-enhanced memories through a series of nine “Mindchain” blocks. Each block contains clues to unlock the next in the sequence, leading players to hunt down file IDs, timestamps, and user IDs using contextual cues in the text, audio, and video files that document Jono’s investigation in addition to the occasional research task requiring players to hack into the occasional voicemail box. There’s something to be said for an ARG that can be completed in less time than it takes to watch a movie, andÂ Back to Earth‘s debut starts off with an experience that packs in enough surprises to whet the appetite without the time investment of a AAA video game.

Due in part to this brevity, the StarFate.Tech immersive experience has the feel of a finely crafted tutorial mission, gradually introducing players to the skills necessary to unlock each new block, with new complications added every few rounds. It also serves to introduce the game’s StarCredits, a blockchain-based digital currency that exists both in-world and out of world to provide a micro-transaction based backbone to the free-to-play experience. Upon registering, players receive 1 StarCredit. Fractions of a credit can be used to ask “SysOps” for hints along the way, or to unlock a short video that provides a graphic end to Jono’s tale.

A Glimpse Behind The Curtain with Cisco’s Game “The Hunt”

January 12, 2011 / Celina Beach

In mid-August, I had the opportunity to work with No Mimes Media, one of the major players in the ARG/Transmedia-creation world, co-founded by ARGNet founder Steve Peters. My role: to “scrub” the websites and puzzles for an alternate reality game (commonly known as an ARG) – what I call “QA” in my day job, consisting of assorted tasks like verifying website content against design documents, and playtesting puzzles to make sure they can be solved as designed. However, it also afforded me the opportunity to see how ARGs are designed and run – a glimpse behind the curtain, and into the inner workings of a development team (often referred to in the alternate reality gaming space as “Puppetmasters”).

Background

The Hunt is the second game by Juxt Interactive and No Mimes Media created for the Cisco Global Sales Experience (GSX), Cisco’s annual sales meeting. For the second year in a row, Cisco has conducted this meeting virtually, using their own products such as Telepresence and WebEx to virtually gather their sales force together for training and information sharing. Including an alternate reality game enhanced the experience while providing education and experience using Cisco’s products by putting the sales force in the center of the action, using Cisco tools to help solve the mystery. An important game mechanic involved players discovering “Key Asset Codes” which are entered into the game’s Hub for points, where the player with the most points at the end of the game is declared the winner.

This year’s experience centered around Isabel Travada, a Cisco System Engineer on a leave of absence to do volunteer work with the Red Cross. Upon returning home one day, she discovered that her apartment has been ransacked, and her father’s journal stolen. Isabel’s father, Ferdinand, traveled the world as a cartographer before his death, and kept a journal of his adventures which he shared with Isabel when she was a child. She was recently featured holding the book on the cover of a magazine that covered her father’s work on an important communications project in Africa, and someone who saw the article broke into her house to take it. Curious about why anyone would want such a private journal, she went through his papers and realized there was more to his writings and drawings than she had noticed as a child. Being very familiar with the book, she is able to recreate some of it from memory, but some portions like the pictures from the places Ferdinand visited are beyond her ability to recall. However, as she pieces her memories together, she realizes the journal is filled with puzzles and clues, and calls upon her friends in the worldwide Cisco sales force to help her solve the puzzles, follow the clues, and send pictures to replace the ones lost. As the players solved the puzzles and figured out the clues, Isabel found herself traveling the world with her father’s former colleague Keith, retracing her father’s steps and coming closer and closer to solving the mystery of the journal, and the man who stole it – and why.
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Seeing Red with Webishades: An Introduction to a Few Web Series

September 12, 2010 / Michael Andersen

Images courtesy of No Mimes Media

Last week, I got a phone call from Felicia Day . . . and you can too.

It all started with an interview with No Mimes Media by Jenni PowellÂ posted on Tubefilter, a news site dedicated to web television. While Tubefilter’s primary focus is web television, alternate reality games and transmedia tactics have been successfully utilized in the space since the early days of YouTube, when lonelygirl15 became one of the biggest breakaway hits for scripted web television.

In the article, Powell mentioned that she recently “had the pleasure to collaborate with No Mimes Media” on a project. And in response to Powell’s final interview question asking where someone could find an ARG to play, No Mimes Media cryptically replied that “you never know, a rabbithole might even be on this very page somewhere, if you look carefully enough!” Sure enough, below that comment was an advertisement for Webishades.

Webishades, it seems, are an amazing new form of sunglasses that let you watch web television on the go. The campy website behind the product fully embraces the aesthetic atrocity that typifies many infomercial pages, while featuring images of the cast and crew from popular web series donning the signature red sunglasses. By following a sequence of clues, players hop seamlessly across websites, email, Facebook, Twitter, and phone trees, punctuated by an automated call from Felicia Day herself.

This experience was highly reminiscent of another one of No Mimes Media’s projects, Mime Academy. Mime Academy was a comedic storytelling experience presented at ARGFest and South by Southwest that billed itself as a “10 Minute ARG” for its ability to tell a cohesive interactive story in a limited amount of time. Webishades succeeds admirably at replicating the condensed feeling of interactivity that made Mime Academy such a powerful exemplar for the potential of alternate reality games.

No Mimes Media: New company, familiar faces

March 13, 2009 / Jonathan Waite

nomimes While the news hasn’t been all peaches and cream in the world, what with companies finding themselves in financial trouble and the what not, here’s a feel-good story for fans of alternate reality games: a new start-up called No Mimes Media has been officially launched, and there are some pretty heavy-duty names attached to the “full-media company.” We received a press release late last night, and here are the details:

No Mimes Media is a collaboration between “[f]ormer 42Entertainment creatives Behnam Karbassi, Maureen McHugh and Steve Peters,” which will be based out of Los Angeles and Austin. The company bills itself as one that “produces engaging cross-platform narrative entertainment, popularly known as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), to support a wide-range of projects including feature films, television, games and original content.” You may know the trio of Karbassi, McHugh and Peters for their work on large-scale ARGs like Why So Serious and Year Zero while under contract with 42Entertainment. You may also know Steve Peters as the original owner of ARGNet (then ARGN). Needless to say, this is a very experienced, savvy group of creative designers, and it appears that they have hit the ground running, as they are already reaching out to project partners for opportunities.

Perhaps by design, this announcement comes days before a panel scheduled at SXSW Interactive, entitled You’re Living in Your Own Private Branded Entertainment Experience. The panel includes Peters, who hints in the press release that the panel may be hijacked, commenting, “Weâ€™ll be announcing something thatâ€™s sort of an ARG wrapped in enigma wrapped in an ARG; and itâ€™s not without controversy, let me tell you!â€ More controversial than a nearly naked man with temporary tattoos? Sounds juicy! Hopefully, we will have someone on hand to take in the panel and relate their experiences here in the days to come.

Editor’s note: Article title revised after initial publication.