I dunno if you watch 24 or not but you should. The show is a non-stop roller coaster each and every season. Now it hasn’t been a home run each time out. I’m looking at you season 6. Looking at you very hard with shifty eyes. Shifty. But it has had a few homers – grand slams really – in its time on the air. This current season is almost over and so far its been a fantastic season. Hasn’t fallen into the same traps as previous seasons. Except for the biggest one that is.

24 was almost called Jack when it came out. The main character is Jack Bauer and frankly the man is James Bond AND Captain America with a bit of Wolverine dipped in awesome juice. And I’m under selling this guy. So its safe to say the show’s main character is Jack Bauer. Now Jack has a daughter. Jack loves his daughter almost as much as he loves America. Maybe more, I can’t tell. The thing is with Kim – his daughter – is that I think the only person in the world that loves Kim is Jack. The audience hates her. Hate is too soft of a word. The audiences truly smurf her. That ugly.


Kim has a habit of smurfing things up in a season. Now the show can’t go on if everything went down smoothly. We the audience understand that and accept it. But what we don’t get is how the daughter of Captain America can so routinely foul things up. If your dad is some kind of super-spy in charge of protecting America from terrorist acts don’t you think when he says “Get out of LA today” you would just get the frak out of town? No questions, just go. Well Kim in just about every season basically doesn’t do that and then gets in the middle of the terrorist act and Jack has to save Kim at the expense of at least 87 federal agents and getting the bad guy. But hey its ok because Jack saved his little girl. This is extremely frustrating to the smurf power.

Kim showed up in the show the other week. Hour 17 or 18 of this season. And the entire show watching world went “Oh smurf here we go again.” Notice the italics. Really. Drink them slanted words in. Because Kim just doesn’t show up. She messes things up. I’m hoping that she doesn’t do that this year but it wouldn’t be 24 if she didn’t. I wouldn’t put it past her to somehow conveniently get in the middle of the latest plot and Jack has to pull some Street Fighter II moves to save her and America.

I don’t know how this relates to games but I think its analogous to annoying characters who have one purposes in games. To annoy the frak out of you. Think Navi from Ocarina. I hear ‘Listen!” every time I close my eyes to this day. I’d like to smush that fairy with my time sword. But its generally an accepted practice in video games to have an annoying voice of god tell you where to go and keep you on track in video games. Other wise the player may get lost and not know what to do for five minutes. Remember Atlas from Bioshock? He was a modern day Navi until they turned him into one of the best devices ever in Video Game history. No the Kim Bauer annoyance award of this generation goes to Niko’s cousin from Grand Theft Auto 4. I hated him so much I traded in my game. The gameplay didn’t help either. Frankly the game sucked big time. But every game nowadays has this type of character. It seems to me that game developers are flat out scared to release a game where the player might get stuck these days. How many games did you beat in the 8-bit era compared to the current gen? Is that because they have gotten easier or because of a better design?

Sadly though writers sometimes have to use the Kim Bauer trick to make you care for the character because its one of the easiest ways to do just that out there. They have deadlines like the rest of us and just sometimes have to take the easy way out to meet those deadlines. The same thing exists in video games. You want to make a truly open world but you also want to have a story. How do you do that without little reminders to point the player in the right direction? It’s not easy and if I knew how to do it easy I’d be a spiffy game designer banging cocktail waitresses two at a time.


  • http://www.jeremybrunson.com Jeremy

    Nice tie to Video Games. I know this is really late, but you should play that 24 game for the PS2. It was OK until you had to play as Tony Almeda and go into a building to save some dude. The building was filled with murderous crackheads, of course. And I think the building was burning as well. It was dumb and frustrating.