Man, do I hate escort missions, as all right-thinking gamers do. Sure, I can see where, in the course of decimating post-apocalyptic mutantkind, or taking out the trash in a city without pity, or ridding the world of freedom-hating terrorists, I might have to keep someone other than myself alive. But enlightened self-interest tells me to leave those clueless slobs twisting in the wind while I look after Number One.

Yet nearly every game forces me to take on that additional responsibility against my will. It doesn’t help that my faceless charge generally has the I.Q. of powdered milk…before you add the water.

Wait, does this mean I'm paying for her college?

Developers usually pull this old chestnut out to change things up and give players a different kind of challenge. Too often, it just hobbles your ability to play the game by adding a low-grade digital moron and strictly enforced babysitting duties. But if you’ve got to have them, here's a little secret to turn the worst part of a game in to the best: Make me care.

I don’t mean the game absolutely must give me a deep emotional investment in my escortee, but that’s not a bad starting point. If time's a factor, just fall back on a few easy narrative gags that films have used for nearly a century. The writers behind RoboCop needed a way to make their main character, Murphy, sympathetic in 10 minutes before they buried him under a ton of emotionless RoboCop armor. Solution: They gave Murphy a famously brutal, torturous death at the hands of evil men. Bingo...the audience invested in the noble victim.

It’s no accident that the two escort missions in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare resonate in very specific ways. In the first, you pull a wounded female pilot out of a downed chopper -- she even cries out in pain when you lift her up -- and tote her to the evac. The second makes you carry Captain MacMillan, the guy you've spent the last hour snipering fools with. Hey, what can you do? He's your partner, and a helicopter you shot out of the sky just fell on him.

You probably sink the cue ball shot on every shot, too.

Those examples hit a key reaction. People in pain, in danger, need your help. So you help. And their sudden vulnerability isn't their fault, either...MacMillan even covers your six pretty well if you set him down in the right spot. As opposed to God of War 2, where Kratos drags a helpless translator through waves of enemies just so he can read a book. A smarter Spartan might've brought the book to the translator instead and saved himself a few mission-failed screens. Wounded in action? That's one thing. Completely helpless and dumber than a bag of hammers? That's another.

Of course, that's not nearly as bad as the gung-ho escortee who blindly charges into enemy nests and gets shot a few thousand times while you're still shaking your head in disbelief.

So there's a fine line between empathy and annoyance, and yeah, sometimes you can ping-pong over that line a lot. I avoided playing Ico for a very long time specifically because it's one long escort mission, and it's entirely true that life would be much simpler without Yorda, your charge. Shadow creatures crawl out of the darkness to get her, not you. But you fight them off with your two-by-four because she's all you've got...and her life is in danger through no fault of her own. She's the damsel in distress, and you're her only hope.

But seriously, she doesn't know how to run away from shadow creatures lumbering straight at her? Not a tough decision, that.

And when we get home, you can be my new mommy!

Ico asks you to buy into the escort mission as an entire game, and given the two main characters are both innocents thrown into an extremely unfair situation, it's not a huge leap. You want to help them escape. In a lot of ways, Ico outlines the four big rules for a smart escort mission, and they all come down to the person you're escorting.

1.    They've got to be an actual person, not a blank cipher.
2.    They have a real reason to be present.
3.    They actually need to be protected.
4.    They must have a sympathetic plight.

To that, I'll add one more: They should have enough brains to behave in ways that make real-world sense.

Give me any decent combination of those things, and I'm in. But honestly, a game should make me like this person to the point where I invest in their well-being. I already feel that way about smart, funny, innocent, empathetic, terrified, and incredibly brave Elizabeth, the lady you're hired to retrieve from the flying city of Columbia in BioShock Infinite. She may well hail from the indestructible school of party members, though I hope not. I get the feeling she can handle herself in a bad situation, and I'm willing to handle anything she can't. Why? Because in everything I've seen to date, Elizabeth never felt like someone you're dragging from room to room, hoping she doesn't lope off into some other deathtrap. Elizabeth's a travelling companion. She might even be a friend.

And that's when I really care.