i think most people who have played games have done something that's spiritually the same principles as hacking, which would be glitches and exploits in games, such as using items piled up to access an area that should technically be inaccessible, finding out that jumping through a bunch of hoops in some weird order causes some obscure result that was not originally intended, finding out that there is a little hole in the map and you can shoot a portal through and skip 90% of the level.........fundamentally its all the same thing, which is bypassing the normal restrictions to access what is normally inaccessible, poking holes in the design that provide enough leeway for you to slip through the cracks of control essentially giving you much more freedom than the developers intended
yeah hacking a system is a much more complicated process, but its fairly similar in how you would go about it, its all just about assessing something, drawing up a map of where you need to get to, mapping out the pitfalls, exploring all the behavior of the security implementations and trying to spot some way to either take control of that security or sneak past it without setting off any tripwires, sometimes you will get 90% to your destination before finding out that there is some impossible wall standing between you and what you needed, and then you have to backtrack and find an alternate route, essentially becoming the number 1 coding grammar nazi, looking for,finding and exploiting any mistake or oversight you can find in how the system behaves, and finding a error is only a small part of the process the actual hard work is figuring a way to use that mistake to your advantage....its all good saying "oh if i open 5 tabs on the browser then go to youtube the 3DS crashes".....but how can you use that to your advantage?, WHY does it crash?, does it result in anything at all exploitable? how far can you take this mistake?, can it get you to somewhere else where you can surf a chain of exploits to never never land? or is it just dropping you off at useless crashed system city?