The life analogy with Pac-Man is pretty hilarious, so let’s try to extend that to other games:
Donkey Kong is about being the nice guy that will rescue the beautiful princess no matter the obstacles in your way, from the dumb “monkey”, i.e. not-nice macho guy
Tetris is about the inevitability of failure: you stack and stack and stack, but all your successes disappear and only delay the inevitable death, whereas all your failures pile up and up