关键词: 电子游戏, 凝视, 潜能

Abstract: Despite the shift from “watching films” to “playing games” nowadays, it is still the gaze as the metaphysical foundation that makes game-playing possible. Since the study of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, gaze has not only been considered as simply an isolated act of viewing, but also as a power, a power that constructs the order of the external world and things  on the one hand and incorporates the corporal subjects into the order of the world on the other. In the world of video games, this gaze is twofold: the embodied gaze of the player in front of the screen and the virtualized gaze of the game character. The world order of the game is established in accordance with the twofold gaze. The dialectical relationship between the embodied and virtualized gaze constitutes the ontological precondition that makes game-playing possible. However, if one goes deeper into the world of the game, he will find that that embodied gaze becomes a repetition in the Deleuzian sense, which generates a discontinuous plane of immanence where the relationship between the two gazes is reversed, i.e. the play process in which the embodied gaze controls the virtualized gaze is flipped into an embodied affective relationship, thus opening up a space of potential worlds for the real subject.

Key words: video game, gaze, potentiality