Detective Fiction, Gameplay, and the Recovery of Narrative

Abstract

This paper argues that detective fiction, when understood through Bernard Suits’ theory of gameplay, functions as a resistant narrative form under conditions of cultural and epistemic fragmentation. Rather than offering mere entertainment, detective fiction structures interpretive striving through rules, misdirection, and constraint. Readers engage not as passive consumers, but as game-players navigating a lusory geography that demands retrospective sense-making. Placing Suits in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Byung-Chul Han, the paper shows how detective fiction as gameplay can dissolve ideological appearances, preserve belated narrative temporality, and counter algorithmic narrative flattening. In this light, gameplay reclaims constraint as a condition for meaning, autonomy, and duration. Detective fiction does not merely depict sense-making, it enacts it. As such, it becomes a formal and philosophical response to the crisis of narrative: a lusory structure through which coherence remains possible, even when no longer culturally guaranteed.