Like, I suppose, a substantial plurality of Americans, I've spent a fair amount of time playing Poker with friends. Some people take it very seriously as a gambling game, of course, and I find gambling, at least in its commercial form, repulsive -- yet I've always viewed Poker as a pretty good game, with, admittedly, some gambling attached. As opposed to, say, Roulette, which is a brain-dead game that survives only because there's gambling attached.
The nature of Poker's connection to gambling casts, I think, an interesting light on scoring and leaderboard systems. You can play Poker for matchsticks, but it is not nearly as much fun. It's not that I sit down at a Poker table for the thrill of gambling, or with any real expectation of winning money; I sit down because I'm a gamer, and I like to play games, and Poker is a good one, but the money is how you keep score. Without money, "scorekeeping" doesn't seem meaningful. If you run out of matchsticks, we just give you more matchsticks, so the game can go on. Even if, at the end of the evening, we count up everyone's "score," it still feels flat. Games create endogenous meaning; but in normal Poker, what you bet doesn't have endogenous meaning, but a real one -- money is money. Matchsticks fail somehow to be imbued with enough meaning by the game to satisfy.
Which is odd, in a way, because I can't think of any other game where the scoring mechanism just doesn't feel right. But that's true of Poker-for-Matchsticks.
Again, I don't really want the "gambling" thrill, which is what many play for; years ago, I was invited to play with Joe Haldeman and a number of other science fiction writers, and was rather flattered at the opportunity -- but I backed out when I learned it was $10 ante and table stakes. Whoa. Too rich for me. I like my little nickel-dime-quarter games, with a betting cap; they're fun, and I've never lost more money than I'd spend if I spent the same amount of time in a videogame arcade. So its not that I intrinsically want that tension you get from playing for high stakes; actually, I want to avoid that, although I recognize that it's what many other players want. It's just that somehow Poker needs money for meaning.
Or... Does it?
I've spent some time the last couple of weeks playing Poker Palace, which is a social network implementation of Texas Hold'em. Now, Hold'em is not my favorite game -- I'd much prefer to play some variety of Stud, community games strike me as less interesting -- but I don't mind playing it, and there it is.
For free. Of course; no chance in hell I'd play this game for real money, either online or in person, certainly not with no-limits rules. I like games, not gambling, remember? But somehow, though Poker Palace uses an artificial currency rather than cash, the online equivalent of matchsticks, it still works: It's still satisfying to win or play, the scorekeeping mechanism feels more meaningful than matchsticks do.
The interesting question is "Why is that so?" Why does Poker Palace's 'free' chips work? I think the answer lies in two words: scarcity -- and persistence.
Matchsticks aren't really scare; everybody may start with the same number, but it would be cruel to force someone to stop playing if he runs out. So there's no scarcity. They also do have persistence within our session of play, but no persistence from one session to the next -- as opposed to money, which surely persists, in your pocket or someone else's.
When you join Poker Palace, you get a certain number of free chips, and a smaller amount every day that you sign on. (And, as is usual in social network games, you get more by inviting friends, agreeing to CPA ad offers, or buying more -- the partially hidden business model behind such 'free to play' games, nothing ever required but some percentage of their users do this.) Thus, a string of bad luck (or foolish bets) may deplete you to nothing. That means: No more Poker for you today!
In other words, the loss of currency has a consequence. It's a scarce resource.
And of course your chip total persists in the Poker Palace universe -- and shows up on a leaderboard, where you can check out the 'richest' players currently in the game. So it's a proxy also for social credibility in this community.
Which brings us back to game design issues. Persistent scores are better; even a leaderboard on a soloplay game lends meaning to play, because you enjoy being able to beat your previous score. And resource scarcity, of course, is always fruitful in a game, forcing players to make tradeoffs between objectives.
You just give people more?
Giving people more matchsticks so they can "stay in the game" would be where your model fails, then. That's the equivalent of "let's give you more Monopoly money so you're not bankrupt anymore" -- which kind of, you know, defeats the whole point of the objective of the game being to bankrupt your opponents.
I've played Poker at free-to-play "tournaments" (they had some token prizes for top winners, but like you, I was playing just for the joy of playing). Everyone got an equal number of starting chips, and that was all you got. When you ran out of chips, you were out of the tournament, and tables would be merged together as more and more people dropped out. It was quite fun, I found, even though I wasn't gaining or losing money.
So, I'd extend your theory: the consequence of winning or losing (even with no material gain attached) is where the interest comes from, and the only reason poker-with-matchsticks doesn't work isn't the lack of money, but the lack of a loss condition... at least, if played the way you describe.
"That's the equivalent of
"That's the equivalent of "let's give you more Monopoly money so you're not bankrupt anymore" -- which kind of, you know, defeats the whole point of the objective of the game being to bankrupt your opponents."
Worked for the Obama Administration!
I'm going on vacation next week folks, you've been great.