About Me

I am a Professor of New Media and User Experience at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). I received my honours BA in Music from Brock University in 2007. During my time at Brock I studied clarinet under the instruction of Zoltan Kalman, and was active in the University Woodwind Ensemble and Women’s Choir. I studied Japanese as my program language requirement and subsequently participated in the Ontario Japanese Speech Contest three times, winning awards in both the Intermediate and Advanced categories. I also received a scholarship from the Japanese government (fully covering living and travel expenses) to participate in a one year exchange program, studying at Nagoya Gakuin University from September 2003 to July 2004.

 

Shortly after completing my BA, I began teaching courses part-time in Web design and programming at Niagara College. Having served as a teaching assistant at Brock in Computer Science, Modern Languages (Japanese), and Music, I went on to teach in other part-time contract positions at Brock, Ryerson University, and McMaster University.I completed my MA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2010 and my PhD in Communication and Culture in 2015 from York University. In both of these degrees, I minored in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I joined the University of Toronto in July, 2014 where I teach courses on game design, immersive environemnts, and user experience. In my free time, I train in muay thai and am a student pilot.

Media and Press

Research Interests

Broadly, my research interests fall in several intersecting areas of human-computer interaction and game studies:


  • Self-Representation
  • How do users leverage interface affordances when creating or customizing avatars in games?

  • Educational Game Design
  • How can we design educational simulations and games that will interest young learners in STEM fields?

  • Game User Interfaces
  • Developing and evaluating game user interfaces across a wide variety of platforms and genres.

  • Game Pedagogy
  • Studying the ways in which game development and game design are taught to post-secondary students.

 

Selected Recent Publications

  • Victoria McArthur (2017) Oh the Humanities! Using PowerPoint to Develop Rapid Serious Games Protypes, to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Game Studies Association (June 2017)
  • Victoria McArthur.(2017) The UX of Avatar Customization. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5029-5033. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026020 *recipient of an Honorable Mention Award (top 5% of submitted papers)