Dylan Kilby has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and his interest in communication studies began early in his school career at FSU. As a freshman in Dr. Ulla Sypher’s Cybergeographies course, which looked at the spatial representation of data on the internet, Dylan began fostering an interest in new technologies that would lead him to his current research. He soon discovered that his favorite subject in school could be connected to his favorite pastime: video games.

In the hugely popular Role Playing Games such as World of Warcraft, Runescape, and Skyrim, eventually the game’s narrative will end and players will be left to set goals for themselves. Dylan became very interested in how players created objectives for themselves based on the established rules of the game. By treating video games as microcosmic representations of reality and observing real players, Dylan was able to frame his trials as sociological and psychological experiments whose results have real-world applications. He posited in his honors thesis, Objective-building in user-defined worlds, that the way in which players rewrote the rules to these games and controlled their user experience has implications for a real-world office environment that would be beneficial to both the employers and employees. After his paper was completed, he was contacted by a publisher who was interested in obtaining the rights to his thesis.

Dylan is an honors graduate in the School of Communication but that is not the end of the academic story. Dylan is switching his focus from Communication to Physical Therapy for graduate school, which he attributes to his interest in Kinesiology. “Doing my honors thesis was a way of rounding off my interest in Communications,” says Dylan when asked about his future plans. “It was a good capstone experience for me.”