What Wouldn't Robin Do?

This essay explores how burgeoning gaming communities and hacker networks of the 1970s to the 1990s created a form of “outlaw” ethics that directly invoked Robin Hood as a model for anti-corporate resistance. Gamers and hackers sought to relieve popular anxieties related to digital high technology by figuring hacking as a means through which defiant individuals could revive a revolutionary heroism from a fictional medieval past. This link between rogue technology use and medievalism is apparent in the gameplay of Christy Marx’s 1991 video game Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood; however, Marx’s use of in-game anti-piracy tactics signals an ironic allegiance with the high-tech capitalism that players would expect Robin Hood to subvert. In framing their discussion of hackers’ “outlaw” ethics with a critical analysis of how Marx’s game complicates these ethics, the authors of this essay reveal the extent to which medievalisms have shaped modern perceptions of technology.