Tales of New Babbage

One one level, of course, New Babbage is a series of magnetic impulses imprinted on a set of disks in a nameless data center, running Linden Labs’ Second Life protocol. But that’s just the physics of it. To say that New Babbage is ‘just’ a computer-generated environment would be like saying that Paris is ‘just’ stone and plaster. The City of New Babbage is a consensual hallucination of a Victorian-era steampunk city in a time that never was. It’s filled with airships, clockwork devices, submersibles, evil geniuses, street urchins, and the collective activities and imaginations of hundreds of people from all over the world. And they make it as real as Leeds or Pittsburgh or Warsaw. These are their stories.