Actual Play Vonnegut's Crapshoot with resource pools

[quixoteles]

Premise
I get together some player to pace out some of the newer character creation rule for vonnegut's crapshoot and it sister ideas buckley's rainbow, and the Locke-Spinoza horoscopy to create, stolen from the ideas behind Letter of Patent by Tim morgan that I found on  1km1kt.  I am not satisfied, I am never satisfied with someone else's design, the pacing was too gentle, although this a bit of the point to take the frenetic 3.5 hrs of the original pacing and try to experiment with some kind of atmospheric smolder that will last just as long and promise perhaps the kind of menace that spins up into the critical mode. The environment of the game demands it, It went from the political science fiction epic of Helene-Skyline, to sometime in the aftermath of the players original efforts.  The players, plus one, originally opposed to participating in the original game until the last session--to children labor gulags, where the children of political prisoners and exiles were sold into slavery to build a new city. My friends who I've all know for years, mid-twenties to thirty (my holdout) and face to face three sessions. 

With something like LoP when your pedigree deciding your education the player build up banks to call on losing out on a gambit let to a complication that had to be dealt with, but were clearly mark: prestige, resources, training, and savvy. Emptying these pools in a particular cycle of game, which is one financial quarter leaves a player bankrupt to which "THE AI" lays you off. The players have very little to no memory of anything else beside the gulag, and being let go; you might as well be thrown out an airlock. This created, without the mechanics themselves a sort of... Can I call it menace? I said explicitly that is in the young persons best interest to keep their jobs, but that losing them, was inevitable. They immediately understood the struggle of what we all do at our jobs everyday, trying to be a productive member of society in a competitive environment. The cooperative play was smooth except for the original holdout, he made, belonging to anyone else a brilliant exciting character, but it was due the constraints of the system resource management that it existed. He actually was attempting to do turtling by interacting more with the color bits than with the people, which I can't seem get the hooks to stick in his skin. It happened in my Helene-Skyline setting, where he made me realize that gun's and ownership of a say, house can hold tension-killing story power, and that the beer bottle rule will kill this game. I started again with much fewer resources or at least created a situation where they would not matter. I cannot find away make this person understand story now and cooperation, he's just not playful. This is what I feel like, I may be wrong
I realized that with what I was doing players could start out with negative values for certain pools betting against their other pools in order to break even. this was a little irrelevant, but important if I use a multi-pool mechanic, is this okay to do? Has anyone ever dealt with a RPG who is into role and game but not play? I understand that some games are serious, like polaris seems, or white wolf definitely is, with the candles and the abandoned sugar factories with the trash can fires and the all manner of ephemera, but I am trying to make a game where people act like they do at a nightclub or a football game, my type of fun. How do you sweep them off their feet?

Letter of Patent: http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Letter_of_Patent.php