I looked back to some of my old files. Putting computers in an imaginary world is something I revisit from time to time.

In ~1993 I imagined a post-collapse world where people build computers out of random components, and no two computers are alike. A small village could have a wired network consisting of tens of BBSes. There would be a village-wide messaging network and some wider-area ones. A shop in a nearby town specializes in collecting and selling of components.

In 1995-1996 I had a fantasy world where microchips grow on trees. These trees only grow on a single planet in the known universe and only produce fruit every 200 years (all at the same time). At these times, a democompo is organized, and the entire crop is given to the winner. Cultures spend a lot of effort on raising their representatives that are sent to the planet on slower-than-light spaceships.

In around 2003, I had created another world where all plants and animals (including humans) are born with a "subconscious" that works like a programmable computer and can be hacked telepathically. Magic is based on this; even genetics can be modified by programming. Point-to-point telepathy is short-range, but forests can be used as long-range routing networks. Trees usually have a six-bit code represented as "runes", but the instruction set varies from species to species.

I have been wondering about Brian Moriarty's adventure game Loom (1990) because its conception of magic is somewhat unusual:
1) Magic stems from crafts such as weaving and glassmaking.
2) Magic spells can be found by observing natural phenomena.

Both of these elements are rare in modern fantasy; I'm unable to find any other examples besides Loom itself. However they can be found in folk beliefs (e.g. in the Finnic tradition, sorcery and blacksmithry can be equated, and magical words can be found in nature). I therefore assumed Moriarty may have studied some anthropology.

But no. In a "classic game postmortem" presentation about Loom, Moriarty tells a story of divine inspiration instead: when leafing thru a computer magazine, he noticed an expansion board that was called a "loom", and the entire world with is guilds and magic suddenly came to his mind in a flash.

This made me even more curious about the game.