...and how does one practice to "beat" Pac-Man with a perfect score?

Practicing the game is not pay-to-win, is pay-to-practice. It still requires skill to win.

Getting to the kill screen seems like it should count as a victory. Getting your initials on the top of the high score screen counts too, if perhaps only briefly. The idea that you can't say you've won unless you've played a completely perfect game is a mindset for insane people who will never be happy.

I think GP's point was, if every practice run costs a quarter, there's likely a correlation between wealth/resources and practice/skill.

that's if you're stuck on the idea of beating a game of skill. if you need that idea, then you have to be able to beat pacman, and so you feed quarters to get to the game ending bug. if you dispense with that idea then you play for your best score, and feeding quarters to get to the kill screen becomes a waste of time.

True! And I forgot that aspect of the scoring system.

High score resets whenever the machine is unplugged.

Score isn't the only measure of success in Pac-man or other arcade games.

what difference does it make if the high score table is reset? if you got that score you got that score, that's your achievement, the record just commemorates it.

score very much is the measure of success in pacman and its contempiraries. what else is there?

If you consider the high score list as you would a city wall where local graffiti writers put their tags as a territorial guestbook it makes more sense IMO :-)

Sure, you know that you "won" - but there is also something to the idea of bragging about it!

It’s like a metaphor saying only literal outcomes and shape of the world mean much. Whereas our ephemeral emotions which require us to stay “plugged into” an increasingly demanding cultural tradition despite the diminishing ROI most people are seeing (cause they’re ignoring the literal outcomes and shape for emotional feitishism)