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we approach a new text. Kathleen Jamieson (1975) first used the term antecedent genre to note that a speaker will “draw on his past experience and on genres formed by others in response to similar situations” (p. 408). Thus, the notion of an antecedent genre shows the way that genres influence each other. Each time a speaker or a writer goes to produce text, that text is influenced by their prior notion of texts that already exist in that genre or in closely related genres. Specifically, antecedent genres come into play when new genres are created and draw heavily upon older genres. The act to use older genres as the foundation for new types of texts may be intentional or unintentional. For example, Jamieson (1975) analyzes how the State of the Union address and the response given by Congress used many of the same features as the king’s speech to Parliament and Parliament’s traditional response (pp. 411–13). Even when the situation seems to differ quite a bit, as it did when the United States formed its own union, Jamieson shows that speakers fall back on familiar genres. Despite wanting to create something new for a new country, the first authors of the State of the Union address fell into old patterns—knowingly or unknowingly, they drew on a powerful antecedent genre. Likewise, Anis Bawarshi (2003) notes that “as antecedent forms, genres constitute the ways we perceive situations” and our positions in relation to those situations (p. 94). We come to expect certain things from a genre, whether that genre is a political speech or a form of entertainment, like a game. When we create new genres we use those expectations, and if a genre does not meet those expectations we will likely be disappointed.

The resemblance of computer games to D&D has, for the most part, been a conscious choice of applying characteristics of an antecedent genre to a new text in a new medium. In the late 1980s, TSR, Inc. offered the license for Advanced D&D1 to Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), who used the original tabletop game rules to produce a series of CRPGs (Park & Chin, 1999). Pool of Radiance was released in 1988 (first for the Commodore 64 and then for the home PC), and this game even used images of monsters directly from the D&D Monster Manual book (Rausch 2004). SSI continued to produce games of this nature, but none were as successful as this first attempt. According to Rausch (2004), the release of Baldur’s Gate (1998) represents another significant success in the quest to put D&D in CRPG form. He states that this game “capture(d) the D&D magic in a way that gamers hadn’t experienced since the Pool of Radiance days” (Rausch, 2004).

Rausch (2004) explains that Baldur’s Gate was more successful in capturing some of the more nuanced aspects of the tabletop game, such as character alignment. However, not all agree that the conversion to a CRPG was a complete success. Carr (2006) explains the lack of flexibility often found in CRPGs with a specific example about character alignment in Baldur’s Gate. She attempted to play an evil character in order to test the limits of the game, but found that she was quickly thwarted by either direct interference (where a more powerful non-player character [NPCs] would destroy her character as punishment for her action) or by being unable to open up new areas of the narrative as NPCs became uncooperative. Thus, she found that to actually play the game, she needed to take the attitude that she was following the prescribed measures in the game only to manipulate the NPCs for her own nefarious goals. Carr (2006) explains that this means her character’s “dominant trait (evil) would reside solely in the perceptions of her user” (p. 51).

The use of character alignment in Baldur’s Gate comes directly from D&D. In the original tabletop game, players choose their character alignment on two scales: (1) whether their characters will be good, evil, or neutral and (2) whether they will be lawful, chaotic or neutral. Because computer game designers attempted to draw on the characteristics of the antecedent genre, the