Trivial Trinkets and Tokens

I’m at Aladdin’s Castle at the mall. I’ve probably been dropped off by my parents, or maybe a few of us kids carpooled together for a birthday party or something. Either way, this is a magical place. This is an arcade.

In addition to the wonderful digital sounds—abstract beeps and boops with the occasional explosion or punch or gunshot—you can hear a lot of analog clunking. Those are the video game tokens going into the coin slots, producing constant profit for the owners of Aladdin’s Castle for as long as the arcade stays open.

These tokens have been minted by this company, so you can only use them here (or at one of their other locations around the US). They cost a quarter apiece, but you can insert a dollar bill into the token dispenser and get five of them to come out.

This is all and everything a token is to me. You put it into the machine and you get to play a video game.

I ended up finding a few of these leftover tokens years later—by now, these were just trivial trinkets, worthless since Aladdin’s Castle closed down in the early 90s.

It wasn’t until years later that I began hearing the word token outside of the context of video games. Sure, there were tokens of appreciation, but this was an abstraction of a much earlier use of the word that didn’t really resonate with me, or make me particularly curious about what a token is—except to note that it must be symbolic.

That’s pretty much spot-on, though. A token is simply a symbol for something else. It can look like the thing it’s supposed to represent, or it can appear totally different—the important thing is that it stands in for another thing.

In ancient Sumer, where clever irrigation allowed farming to really scale up, some farmers ended up with a surplus of grain. Their land had produced more than they needed to feed their immediate families, so they decided to trade that extra grain for something more useful to them.

Now, let’s stop to imagine this for a moment. You’ve got this giant bushel of grain you need to give to someone else—fine if they’re coming over to get it tomorrow and they’re just handing over a goat directly to you. That’s easy and intuitive, and bartering like this has happened all over the world for tens of thousands of years.

However, what if you notice that so-and-so needs a bushel of barley and is willing to give you a pile of bricks for said barley. However, you don’t need any bricks—but your buddy next door (who has a goat) is building a house and could use some bricks next week.

Do you really have to bring the bushel of grain over to so-and-so’s house, swap for the pile of bricks, then lug those bricks over to your neighbor’s house, who will finally give you that goat?

What if there was some way to symbolize a bushel of grains so that you didn’t have to lug it around with you everywhere you went? What if you could just swap that token for a real bushel of grain any time you wanted?

We’ve just invented currency, but that’s only one type of symbol. We’ve also been spitting ochre around our hands to make tokens of ourselves, and once we figured that out we started making tokens of animals we feared or revered. Art on cave walls is preserved today, but we were probably making art all over the place tens of thousands of years ago, because we had figured out tokenization.

Tokens aren’t just trinkets that allow you to play video games, and they’re much more than symbols for currency. Words and the symbols we use for numbers are all tokens. Tally marks on a piece of wood are tokens. So is any kind of idea whatsoever that is represented by something else.