Playful Hacker

As opposed to the malicious Cracker who uses his computer skills for profit and mayhem, the Playful Hacker normally wants nothing more than to explore new territory on the Net and learn new things.

Sometimes, he plays harmless pranks which can cause clueless authority figures to confuse him with his dark counterpart. Even when his actions are not strictly legal, though, his intentions and presence are almost always benign—even heroic.


 * Come on, am I (KatanaCat) the only one on here who's ever considered using a hex editor to get a ton of lives in SonicTheHedgehog2?
 * Endlessness: I have edited the source code of some open-source games to give me advantages.


 * A good friend of this troper's, along with that friend's (now ex) boyfriend were, essentially, a BattleCouple of playful hackers. They even had a HackerCave!
 * PoochyEXE: This troper once played as one of these types in a futuristic tabletop RP. Said character's favorite hobby was hacking into electrical systems of skyscrapers. His goal? To manipulate the lights in the windows in order to play Tetris. (I may also be a lesser example in real life, since I also enjoy breaking video games into a million little pieces using glitches and/or by doing things the developers obviously never intended. I LOVED Star World 1 in SuperMarioWorld as a kid because of all the weird stuff I could do, since the physics of those spinning blocks were a bit wonky.)


 * SoWeAteThem: I knew somebody who cracked into a fighting H-Game JustForFun. He said he felt sorry for them; many of the more obscene aspects of the game looked to him like they took hours, but all it would take to negate them was a semicolon at the end of each relevant line.
 * This troper's little sister was once able to guess the password of her classmate's Friendster account. She then proceeded to change is background to Sailor Moon and his profile pic to Hello Kitty.