My husband and I loved to play RPG games online and we tried out multiple Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). The first few games we played I really enjoyed playing since I got to talk to so many different people from all around the country. I was able to type in order to communicate with them.
In the games we would form organizations known as guilds in which we would work together to achieve a common goal. In one previous games known as Horizons: Empire of Istaria we were able to work together to build our own houses and shops. Sometimes we would gather together and hunt together since it was safer to work together as a group. 
Later my husband and I moved on to a game known as World of Warcraft. In the initial stages we were able to form a small guild and make some friends to socialize with and to go explore dungeons with. Most of these dungeons would have 5-10 players accompany you and they were not very difficult and could be played pretty much just for fun and perhaps some new gear for your character.
As we progressed in the game it came to a point where we needed to participate in larger scale dungeons known as raids. These had up to 40 players participating in order to bring down some of the boss level monsters.
The amount of coordination required in order to achieve success in the raids was quite a bit. There was just too much instructions that needed to be given to individual players that it didn’t make a lot of sense to type it all out. Many guilds moved to voice chat programs such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Our guild used Ventrilo and it allowed you to chat through a headset and speakers in order to hear one another. It was intresting technology since 40 people were able to communicate with one another at the same time via voice chat.
Being a hearing impaired person though made it difficult for me I had to rig my headset to a speaker that allowed me to crank up the volume. I had my analog hearing aids at the time so I would try putting the headset on my hearing aids or sometimes go without. It also didn’t help that I had an important role in the raid. I had the role of an off-tank which basically means I had the job of keeping the big boss angry at me so all my friends could pound it to death. If our main tank went down I had to leap in and take over or perhaps during certain encounters we had to coordinate switching between the two of us. The required me to hear when it was my turn to do something.
Sadly the game became more and more difficult and my hearing wasn’t getting better so my husband and I stopped participating in the raids. It didn’t help that him and I were doing some smaller level stuff together and would see the guild mates cheer that they had just accomplished something massive. We eventually gave up on the game and stopped playing all together and cancelled our accounts.
Now that I got my new Opticon digital hearing aids and use the streamer I am able to plug my computer into the streamer and I can hear just fine. We haven’t gone back to gaming though since we are now focused on other things but I wish I had this technology earlier.
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