Can You Even Read? Examining Literacy and AI Through Gameplay

Abstract

This paper discusses a game research-creation which explores the relationship between compromised attention spans and the diminishment of basic literacy skills in the age of Generative AI. By forcing the issue of attention into the game’s core mechanic, Can You Even Read? brings the new literacy crisis into harsh definition for players. This short, educationally-focused game asks players to consider the increased difficulty of conducting close readings of long form texts, in an attention economy that instead primes them for surface readings of short form texts. The game additionally highlights for players how such sparse attention economies can make would-be readers more susceptible to undermining their own close reading skills through overreliance on Large Language Models (LLMs) as a reading “aide.” There is an established base of research recognizing how using LLMs and short-form based social media is undercutting critical thinking skills, literature analysis skills, and attention span (Kosmyna et al. 2025; Yousef et al. 2025; Wardak 2026). Increasingly students are displacing their reading responsibilities onto generative AI (Aljohani 2024; McClain et al. 2026; Stone 2025), relying on AI summaries and analysis of texts, rather than interfacing with the texts themselves. By leveraging Citton’s concept of Attention Economy (2017), this game engages with how the enforced attention scarcity of today’s digital world stymies critical literacy skills while encouraging LLM reliance to complete reading based tasks. Can You Even Read? is a short game which asks the player to navigate text through the simple act of reading. While reading this text, the player becomes inundated with suggestions to stop and have AI summarize what they have read so far, in addition to increasingly aggressive advertisements, SMS texts, and pings from social media. Designed with secondary and postsecondary classrooms in mind, Can You Even Read? is a pedagogical tool through which to better understand how the contemporary digital attention economy can impact students’ literacy skills. It is, importantly, not a game designed to be won, but to promote thought, questions, and reflections in the player on what it means today to read well, or simply to read at all.