How These Deaf Gamers Are Making ‘World of Warcraft’ More Inclusive

For all its joys, gaming can be really hard. Take massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), a popular genre whose many overlapping systems often require a constant stream of information being blasted at the player. Unlike, say, first-person shooters like Call of Duty, MMOs aren’t about twitch-based gameplay or fast reaction times. They’re about working together with other players (or occasionally, against them) for a common goal, whether that goal be to gather resources or defeat an enemy too powerful to take on solo. 

Launched in 2004, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is one of the biggest and most culturally known MMOs, and to this day maintains an extremely healthy player base. In the 20 years since its release, the game has grown exponentially, with ten full expansions and even relaunches of its classic modes beginning in 2019, building toward an outright massive amount of content for players to explore alone or with others. 

As with every game this size, however, there’s a certain barrier to entry. MMOs, especially, require a lot of communication to complete a task or a quest, with some members creating “guilds” to put like-minded people together. For differently-abled gamers, this presents a problem. It can be extremely difficult to coordinate with teammates or partners who don’t understand them or their individual needs, especially in the heat of the moment mid-game.

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That’s where the Undaunted Guild comes in. Undaunted Guild is a group of players from the deaf and hard of hearing community whose goal is creating an inclusive environment for people to play World of Warcraft. Through the guild, a tight knit community has formed, with members making personal connections, communicating with Blizzard directly on improving their accessibility options, and leaving a lasting impact on each other and the game that they love.

Ahead of World of Warcraft’s 20th anniversary, Rolling Stone spoke with members of the Undaunted Guild about how overcoming challenges with accessibility has improved their online experience, the impact that the guild has had on their lives, and why they think the game has continued to thrive over the years. 

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Doing things differently

Undaunted was formed in 2011 with the express purpose of helping people who want to get into World of Warcraft, but have different physical needs. Over the years, several accessibility features have been added to the title, it wasn’t always so easy to get into the world of Azeroth. 

JennyLynn Mason, who goes by the in-game name Ciopori, is one such player. As someone who is deaf-blind, she initially struggled to learn how to play WoW, but was able to get into it with the help of her friends. But she found that it wasn’t a realistic support system she could rely on long-term.

“Being deaf-blind, I couldn’t fully depend on the visuals,” Mason says. “There were many aspects of the game, such as the chat feature, which was hard to read. When I first joined, I joined with friends who helped me to learn the game. They showed me where to go and they guided me and I followed them. But then they started to leave and I was left alone at a crossroads.” 

Nick Wilhite (Amis, in-game), a deaf member of the guild, says that while it was possible for him to join teams in the game before joining Undaunted — usually with mixed results — being part of the guild gives him a degree of respect from players who want to get involved.

“When I joined a pick-up game, it was not a real team,” Nick says.” It was a mixed hodgepodge of people, so when I joined typically they required a headset. But for me, with Undaunted, it gives me kind of a backstage pass. We get respect from the community for not needing those things, so we kind of have a badge of honor and a name in the community to help partner with hearing players” 

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Finding acceptance among all players

Colin Ramsay, the Guildmaster of Undaunted who goes by the handle Saormash, credits a short documentary, released last year on the official World of Warcraft YouTube channel, with helping to spread awareness of the guild. Ramsay says that he’s seen a greater amount of outreach from those outside the community following the video’s launch.

“I think we have had some increased acceptance since the documentary because we do, on occasion, have hearing players from other guilds come into our Discord server and ask how they can be accessible to the players who haven’t found our community yet,” Ramsay says. “It’s become such a recurring event that we have an article on our website that we can point those players to so that they can learn how to better accommodate the deaf players in their guild.” 

The positive social impact of the community extends beyond cooperative gameplay, and the guild considers themselves closer to family than simply teammates. Several members have met lifelong friends — even their partners — through the guild.

Taylor Wilhite (Karatil in-game) met her husband, Nick, playing World of Warcraft as part of the Undaunted Guild. “Connection is very important to me,” she says. “I met my life partner through the game, but I’ve [also] met some of the best people I know [through the guild]. We go to each other’s weddings, we go to baby showers, we fly in from all over just to see each other. It does feel like a family.”

Ramsay tells a similar story. He joined the guild four years ago and met his wife last year through an event that the guild holds annually.

“We have a secret Santa event that we do every year,” Ramsay says. “My wife lives in New Zealand, and last year she wanted to try some American Candy; [I] requested to be her Santa and sent her all kinds of American candy. I think it was a 15-pound box of goodies, and we started dating online shortly after that. We got married last month in New Zealand.”

The Legacy of the Undaunted Guild

Twenty years is a long time for any game to last, let alone one fully dependent on constant player engagement. The members of the Undaunted Guild believe that the reason World of Warcraft thrived boils down to a combination of timing and the sheer amount of options it gives players.

“I think World of Warcraft has a lot of staying power because it kind of hit the ground running at the right time,” Ramsay says. “As voice chat and video chat were taking off, it meant that you could build communities outside of the game. So, it was really one of the first games where you were building communities that weren’t just within the game.”

Another reason that Ramsay believes that the game has staying power is the amount of add-ons available, which allow players the ability to personalize their user interface to suit their individual needs. These modifications can allow players to customize what information is presented to them on-screen or pull up fully detailed maps with notes on every area. Several members of the Undaunted Guild actually use add-ons to make the game as accessible as possible.

While the concerns about information overload in MMOs can be off putting to newcomers, Blizzard has spent years working on improving the accessibility options of its games, built with the input and support from differently-abled communities. As it stands now, World of Warcraft is exponentially more playable to more groups than ever before.

2022’s Dragonflight expansion added the ability to change the on-screen text size, making everything easier to read at a scalable level. Incidentally, in that same expansion, the first deaf character was introduced in the form of Sansok Khan. Blizzard developers even worked with Undaunted members to give the character a unique sign name, a special way to identify a person without fully spelling out their name in ASL.

Despite the general perception that MMOs like World of Warcraft are incredibly complicated, Ramsay believes that there’s a very easy way to get into the game without being overwhelmed: concentrate on what makes you happiest.

“My advice is that World of Warcraft has something for everybody,” he says. “You don’t have to start out on the deep end, doing hardcore raiding and player vs player (PVP). You can just create a hunter [class] and go around taming all the pets that you like.”

Ramsay believes that, despite the game’s sometimes competitive nature, it isn’t always about that; there’s no one right way to play. “You don’t necessarily have to jump in and be the best of the best, you can choose things that you wanna focus on,” he says. “We have a lot of players in Undaunted who are casual players who log in, do a couple of things from past expansions and then log out. That’s a perfectly fine way to play the game.”

Guilds like the Undaunted are paving the way for representation in World of Warcraft, and have inspired multiple new communities to spring up, helping people with different needs to have the better online and social experiences through gaming.

“Real life can be isolating if you don’t have a deaf community around you, and I think that Undaunted gives our players a community to be a part of a family,” Ramsay says. “We always try to support each other.”