The 1983 movie "WarGames" epitomized what the public perception of hacking would eventually become: illegal at best and dangerous at worst. But for the most part, the 1980's were not an overly dramatic decade in hackerdom. As suggested by both Steven Levy and Paul Taylor, this "third generation" of hackers were masters of computer games; they were nerds who absorbed themselves playing video games on the computer in a kind of eerie, Poltergeist trance. This activity allowed for a bit of creativity and experimentation in the hacker subculture. Levy describes this mentality: "You could play the games, but if you were hacker-born, that would not be enough. You would ask, 'Why can't the game do this?' 'Why can't it have that feature?' And since this was a computer, for the first time in your life you would have the power to change this into that" (313). The games Space Invaders and Pacman had been introduced onto the marketplace in 1979; such games as "Zork" and "Sim City" would follow. Many hackers in the 1980's would find their entry into the activity through these computer games, later embarking on more serious forms of programming and alteration. These hackers were of a different breed, and not necessarily coming into the computer realm from an intellectual standpoint or a background in engineering, as so many of their predecessors had. Douglas Thomas notes that, "While the 'old-school' hackers were usually graduate students at large universities, their 'new-school' counterparts are substantially younger, usually teenagers who have a particular affinity for technology" (x). This generation of hackers often had little conception of the consequences of their actions and certainly not of what constituted private, copyrighted property in this new realm of "cyberspace," a termed coined in 1984.

Children and teenagers coming of age in the 1980's were in a peculiar and utterly unique position of being often more technologically savvy than their parents and teachers. Computers and technology were always changing and new software and computer games were hot commodities; hacking came to represent a form of rebellion that could not be easily curtailed because it could not be easily charted, or unlearned. Levy suggests that the third generation lacked the real sense of community that had characterized the previous generations. The relationships stopped involving people sharing knowledge and information about computers and technology with other people, a trademark of the labs at MIT and the Homebrew Computer Club, and began to encompass only one relationship, the teenager to his computer. A certain level of thoughtful discussion and trading of ideas had been lost. This was a somewhat ominous development and would pave the way for the criminalization and denigration of hacking in the 1990's. It would also prove to be a rather foreboding atmosphere in which to welcome the creation of the World Wide Web, in 1990.