Giving flesh to bones: how kanji lost its pictures

Kanji began as pictures. Centuries of use wore the pictures down into the abstract characters people write today. The project asks a design-history question with a straight face: what matters more — the ancient origins, or how people use kanji now?

A matching game connects modern characters back to their original picture forms, so learners meet each character's story instead of memorizing strokes. Getting a match wrong is part of the point — the distance between picture and character is the history.

Made during my own Japanese studies — the game I wished existed. Designing a critique as something playable made the argument land harder than any poster could.