Her screams or calls to wait would echo my failure as the mission failure screen came up. What did I do wrong?

Theres no harder mission in a shooting game than that of an escort mission “ covering someones back from an onslaught of baddies.

There is a lot of danger in all these levels for the escortee, and sometimes it doesnt always come from the bad guys. Once in a while the escorter can cause the most damage.

Think about the first game to really use the escort mission, GoldenEye 007, with James Bond and Natalya.

There you played as James Bond (the worlds greatest lover) with some guns and your own skills to keep relationship-destroying forces at bay.

Take the jungle mission, where Natalya both follows Bond around and explores on her own. At times she would be in the thick of things, getting shot by the player and everyone else around.

These missions are royal pains for me. The way I like to handle first- and third-person shooters is a style known as run and gun. I like to run in there guns blazing and shooting up the area. Not the most neat and clean way of doing it, but it works for me.

The problem came when I would just run around guns blazing and not really pay enough attention to Natalya. She would get ahead or left behind and then, sooner or later, end up dead.

I wasnt ever really a huge fan of sniping “ I dont have the patience “ so sitting back and killing people never worked for me. Plus Im a horrible shot. So I would wait for her to get into trouble and then save her, but that didnt work either.

In GoldenEye 007, if I let her follow me around, I would often cap her in the face. So I would run ahead and kill faster than she would run. If she got too far away, she would get mauled buy some thugs I didnt see, or just stand there and wouldnt move. My mission would always be incomplete.

Her screams or calls to wait would echo my failure as the mission failure screen came up. What did I do wrong?

The simple answer is that I didnt listen to her.

So what did this teach me about relationships? That space is important to both members of a relationship and that space requirement changes during the relationship and communication guides you though those times.

In the game when Natalya would go ahead and lower some bridge or go somewhere in the game where I couldnt, I had to trust that she could handle it on her own. She would say, Just a minute James, or whatnot to guide me.

But then again there were times when I knew that she needed me by her side. She would call out that I shouldnt go running ahead without her.

The key thing was communication. As annoying as her screams were, I knew that those were the times when she needed me. Playing those levels required some good listening skills. You had to move ahead to progress with her but go back to help when she called.

When she called me for help, I needed to be there; when she didnt, I knew that I could give her space and explore on my own.

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