I was playing a game and a little boy said, おにいさん. I was wondering why it was
written in hiragana? Is it because the boy wasn't my brother, so putting it in
hiragana changes the meaning?
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kanji
Why are simple kanji sometimes written in hiragana?
No, there is no such rule that お兄さん and おにいさん refer to different things.

Usually, there is no strong reason to write this word with kanji or in all-
hiragana. Both お兄さん and おにいさん are perfectly natural ways to write this word,
and there is little difference. See: [Why is 私 a sixth grade
kanji?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/62132/5010)

However, all hiragana words can sometimes give a slightly _mild_ , _friendly_
or _childlike_ impression. If the speaker is a friendly little boy, this fact
may increase the likelihood of おにいさん a bit. See: [What does it mean for the
'feel' of a sentence / text when it's written in all
hiragana?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/15108/5010) and [Why is the
place's official name written as "なら工藝館" (rather than
"奈良工藝館")?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/35785/5010).
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2023-02-02T02:05:47.113
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In addition to linguistic reasons, if you're playing an older game (especially
something on, say, an 8-bit console) then there were often technical reasons
for not using many, if any, kanji. Storing the font for the English alphabet
on a cartridge doesn't take up too much space because there are only 36
alphanumeric characters plus however much punctuation you're using. Storing a
full set of hiragana _or_ katakana requires more than 50 characters depending
on how you manage the diacritics and half-size characters. Storing a half-way
decent amount of kanji might require hundreds of characters, which starts
eating heavily into space that could contain more actual game content.

Additionally, it's usually not too hard to make kana readable in an 8x8 pixel
box, but any half-way complicated kanji is likely to become an entire mess.
Look at the discussion in [this
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8px-
height-font-understandable-for-japanese-knowing-people) for an example of how
overly-pixellated kanji are undesirable.
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