It is pretty simple. Respect your employees and they will respect you. Respect starts with valuing the employee's contributions by paying them a fair wage. It continues with treating them well. A way of treating them well might be a point ping table, but that comes on top of a fair wage, not instead of.
A good manager might recognise a hard working team needs a way to relax and gets a pool table or something. The employees are happy and tell their friends they've got a pool table at work, everyone is jealous. It seems like the pool table is the reason but it is just a symptom of them being generally treated well.
I wonder if this is how this whole trend started: some decent manager recognized their hard working well-paid and taken care of team deserved some extra something, got them a pool table or whatnot, then other shittier companies copied this thinking it was a solution in itself without understanding why the thing was installed in the first place