Aside from the obvious reasons of mindless diversion, pure visceral entertainment and taking a break from the hardships of reality, there is another reason that gamers love games -- the fact that dead does not mean dead, errors can be undone and second chances are all the rage. When you fall off a bridge in a video game, you can always give it another shot once your temper has cooled. Not so in reality. With that in mind, it's no wonder that gamers constantly fantasize about the ability to utilize video game rules in real life situations. How great would it be to come into contact with a star that renders you invulnerable and gives you super speed? You'd never be late for an important date ever again!

In the spirit of these types of wishes, here are five video game rules that would greatly benefit our day-to-day existence.

Extra Lives: Who doesn't dream about the possibility of coming back from a fatal encounter? If you're hurriedly running across the street and get hit by a shipping truck, it's probable that you're not going to rebound from something so destructive. But with extra lives, death would no longer be an end-all-be-all problem; it would merely be a nuisance. Putting the benefit of reliable resurrection aside, extra lives would also be great because they would allow us to operate on a trial-and-error basis. You couldn't clear that ten-foot jump by running from a 25-foot distance? Not to worry -- based on your near-death experience, you can recalculate the distance needed and give it another shot. Problem solved!

Cheat Codes: Nobody likes a cheater, except when they are implementing a complex series of button mashing maneuvers in order to unlock unfair advantages. That's not exactly something you see in your regular daily life, but when it comes to the video gaming world, it's not an uncommon tactic -- just check out Grand Theft Auto and Contra for famous examples. I certainly wouldn't advocate using cheat options to go on a killing spree, but wouldn't it be nice to have a certain level of invulnerability, super speed or invisibility that you could tap into simply by walking two steps forward, two steps back, one to the left, one to the right, another to the left, another to the right, pushing B then A and finally start? With moves like that, you'd be the talk of the town.

Power-Ups: Like cheating, performance-enhancing drugs are not something that should be championed by any self-respecting individual. But I think most people would get behind the idea of ingesting a magic mushroom from a faraway land that doubles or even triples your size, or rubbing against a special flower that causes you to produce great balls of fire at will. On second thought, this could be a new era of dangerous drug abuse that we might want to avoid -- but if relegated responsibly by the proper officials and used for good causes like disaster relief and peacekeeping in dangerous areas of the world, power-ups could be a great boon to civilization.

Saving Your Progress: Whether you're hoping to give a situation another try or simply relive an enjoyable experience, save points would be one way to go. Let's imagine, for instance, that you're in the middle of an intense hike through the wilderness. It's an incredibly beautiful and fun excursion, but one that nonetheless causes no small degree of physical discomfort. Rather than turning back and calling it quits, however, you could simply save your progress, go back to what you were doing before, and continue the hike later. If you're in the midst of enjoying a delicious sandwich but you don't want to finish the thing, just save it in time and resume your progress later when you're hungry again. Sure, that's why we have refrigerators, but saving foodstuff at randomly distributed save points sounds like a cooler idea, if not a funnier one.

Special Attacks: Fighting is never a good thing and should be avoided at all costs, but there are some occasions where you simply need to defend yourself from an aggressive attacker. In those hopefully few instances, the use of a deadly weapon or martial arts move might suffice, but neither would be as cool or surprising as a spontaneously produced fireball or razor-sharp gust of wind. Can you imagine a mugger trying to forcibly steal your wallet, only to meet a face full of blue Hadoken fire in response? The awestruck look on the attacker's face would be priceless, but the subsequent fame and fortune you'd get from the entertainment world would have a significantly impressive price tag as well.