Frotzophone by Adam Parrish [at the ITP Winter Show and NIME @ Exit Art on December 13, 2007] – Maps, games, music: what do they have in common? Interactive fiction has its roots in maps: Will Crowther’s original Adventure was a faithful simulation of an actual cave in the Colossal Cave system. Some say that the entire genre consists of “interactive maps,” and mapping as a process often serves as the foundation for both designing and playing interactive fiction.

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. This information, along with a record of the player’s movement through the map, is used to generate music. The music follows the underlying structure of the game, revealed gradually as the player progresses through it; the branching, recursive, rhizomatic structure of the game is recapitulated in the generated sound.

Among the goals of the Frotzophone is to explore the dual meanings of the words “play” and “map.” Is “playing” an instrument the same as “playing” a game? What happens when the act of playing the game is the same act as playing the instrument? Is the “mapping” of interface to action the same as the “mapping” of a virtual space? What happens when the map of the space itself serves as the basis of the interface mapping?