Assistant Professor - Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto Mississauga
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
- I was interviewed for the Spring 2017 issue of the University of Toronto Magazine on Project PARSEC and edutainment
- I was a guest on CBC Ontario Today on Tuesday, July 26th with host Rita Celli, answering all of your questions about augmented reality games and Pokemon GO!
- I participated in 8 morning shows for CBC Radio: Quebec AM, Kitchener-Waterloo, Windsor Morning, The Trailbreaker, Regina Morning Edition, Daybreak South, Daybreak Kamloops, and A New Day Whitehorse (July 21, 2016)
- I was interviewed by U of T News to discuss Pokemon GO on campus (July 20, 2016)
- I was interviewed by CBC News to dicuss Pokemon GO and dating (July 19, 2016)
- I recently appeared on CBC Ottawa Morning (link to audio clip) and CBC Ontario Morning to discuss Pokemon GO (July 12, 2016)
- I was recently interviewed in the Globe and Mail to discuss The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (June 16, 2016)
- I was interviewed in the Spring 2016 issue of UTM magazine.
Research Interests
Broadly, my research interests fall in several intersecting areas of human-computer interaction and game studies:
- Self-Representation
- Educational Game Design
- Game User Interfaces
- Game Pedagogy
How do users leverage interface affordances when creating or customizing avatars in games?
How can we design educational simulations and games that will interest young learners in STEM fields?
Developing and evaluating game user interfaces across a wide variety of platforms and genres.
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)
