What game are you speaking of here?
While it’s true that flying is one of Harry’s few actual skills, and that his skills aren’t usually what lead to his successes, I wouldn’t say that everything else just happens to him. Most of the good things that happen to Harry happen because he has friends, and I think that the power of friendship is a perfectly valid message for a children’s book.
The main reason it makes no sense is that the rules make capturing the Golden Snitch much, much more important than the rest of the game. Not only is the Snitch worth vastly more points than the conventional goals, it controls when the game ends. You don’t need to know much about sports, just basic game theory to understand that most strategy and gameplay should therefore revolve around the Snitch - not only capturing it for your team, but preventing the other team’s Seeker from capturing it, not just for the points but to control when the game ends so as to guarantee a victory for your team. Yet the majority of the team members and team strategy revolve around the conventional goals, with the Seeker off to do his own thing playing essentially a separate game from everyone else.
It’s actually a microcosm of the narrative of the entire books, how the actions of Harry and his friends are more important than the entire rest of the wizarding community in defeating Voldemort. But at least there you have the excuse that very few people in the wizarding community had a clue what was going on, and Harry was blessed by plot contrivance to be key in Voldemort’s defeat. With Quidditch, you would think that after a few years someone would point out the mismatch between team design and strategy and the game’s scoring system and win conditions. Then again, the Wizard world is remarkably deficient in common sense and is ruled by the notion that nothing which is traditional should ever be questioned.
The Seekers aren’t completely independent of everyone else, since they’re the primary Bludger target for the Beaters.
Britain is notorious for doggedly maintaining tradition ahead of common sense.
Okay, lets say one team is significantly better using the quaffle, as well as stipulating that the snitch takes an extended time to catch. After a few hours the team achieves a lead of over 150 points. Then what? They play for days or weeks knowing the outcome? Even if the brooms used to be weaker, the sport makes no sense.
I do think Rowling’s weakness is more with math than with sports specifically. Anytime she deals with numbers things get dicey.
Yeah like I never quite got the hang of the size of the houses, the student body, or the proportion of wizards to muggles. It seemed impossible that muggles wouldn’t cotton on to all these weirdos populating the planet.
Of course it doesn’t make sense: It’s a sport. Cricket matches that go on for days don’t make sense, either, except that we’re used to it in the case of cricket.
Besides, even if one team gets a lead of a few hundred points in the first few hours, that doesn’t make the outcome known. Sure, they’re better now, but who’s the better team once fatigue (and, eventually, sleep deprivation) starts kicking in?
That’s not the same thing at all. The rules of cricket make sense in that they have been balanced and adjusted over the years to create the conditions for a reasonably even and potentially exciting competition to occur between teams. It’s the same for every other popular sport in real life. It’s why in American football, the relative value of various kinds of scoring have been altered widely over the course of a century and why basketball goes through occasional rules changes.
A reasonably interesting competition can’t occur when the value of one form of scoring is so completely disproportionate. In real life, the game would have changed over the years, either from people giving up on the quaffle and concentrating only on the snitch, or by adjusting downward the value of catching the snitch. It would be forced to make more sense, or people would just stop watching or playing it.
I can’t cite this, but I seem to remember reading a quote from J.K. Rowling where she said she’d never really been a sports fan and that she was afraid this was all too obvious if one thought much about Quidditch.
As someone who is also not a sports fan, I don’t have any particular problem with Quidditch. It strikes me as rather silly and pointless and doesn’t seem like much fun to play or watch, but that’s exactly how I feel about every sport in the world. As Chronos and Shodan have said, the rules of real-world sports do not make much sense either. The rules are the rules and that’s just the way it is. If the rules of Quidditch were not internally consistent then I could understand the objection, but they are. Catching the snitch is always worth 150 points and always ends the game, this doesn’t vary at random or for obscure reasons. Once you allow for the use of magical items then if anything Quidditch strikes me as having simpler rules than many real-world sports.
I think the Quidditch scenes in the movies have been muddled and boring, but they didn’t bother me in the books and I think the game generally worked well as a plot device. Quidditch gives Harry a chance to interact with kids outside his year and outside his House, gives him something fairly normal to be excited or depressed about*, and provides an opportunity for relatively low-stakes peril. I note that Harry was motivated to learn the Patronus charm, which becomes very important later on, largely because of an incident on the Quidditch field in book #3.
It’s my impression that Rowling didn’t really love writing about Quidditch in and of itself. It features less prominently in the later books, and Harry doesn’t play in all that many Quidditch games over the course of the series. Looking at Wikipedia now I see that while he could in theory have played in 21 games during the series (three Gryffindor games per academic year), he actually only participates in nine. Two-thirds of his games occur during the first three books in the series. Book #3 is the only one where he participates in a full three-game season. There are no Hogwarts Quidditch games in books #4 and #7 (although #4 does have the World Cup match), and Harry is prevented from playing a full season during all the other books.
*Being upset because you’ve got detention and can’t play your favorite sport is (thankfully) a problem more kids can relate to than being afraid an evil man is going to kill everyone you care about.
Krum should’ve been investigated for match fixing.
This is just plain wrong.
I dunno…
Confundus, Imperio, Legilimens, Obliviate.
Would tend to explain some really incompetent or nasty people in corporate management positions.
With all due respect, you are - by your own admission - speaking from a position of ignorance, and again, I say this without meaning to be insulting, your ignorance shows. It is just plainly, factually, beyond any doubt whatsoever the case that the rules of real-world sports make PERFECT sense.
The rules of baseball, to use that as an example since I know it better than any other sport, are perfectly sensible. Every reasonably possible event is dealt with in the rules, and the rules come to gether to create a sport that has no scoring holes or logical problems the way Quidditch does. You may think baseball is silly or a waste of time and that’s fine, but the logical consistency of the rules is absolutely solid. There is no hole or imbalance on them. That is, in fact, one of the reasons the rulebook is as long and as complex as it is; over the years the powers that be have deliberately tried to make the rules make MORE sense. When an ambiguitity or imbalance is found, it is swiftly corrected. Consequently, the game’s internal balance and logic is remarkably sound. It’s been played for at least 160 years in its current form and is phenomenally well designed. Much the same can be said of soccer, football, hockey, basketball, or most any sport.
In Quidditch Through the Ages, Rowling fleshes out some of the details. Supposedly, Quidditch started out centuries ago as a ball-and-stick game with (presumably) straighforward scoring. The Snitch came later, added after a famous disruption involving an endangered bird that wreaked havoc during one match. So, essentially, it was an add-on to an already more-or-less developed game.
Except that doesn’t make any sense either. It’d be like saying that if a pitcher hits a bird in-flight with a pitch that his team gets 15 runs and the game ends right there just because Randy Johnson did it once.
As noted, Quidditch without the Snitch makes more sense. So I can buy that it was added later. Added for that particular reason, well, again as noted, wizards seem to be a rather eccentric lot.
But if they released robotic birds during all MLB games that the players had to dodge while fielding…scoring anomalies or not, I might want to watch that!
Is there something about my post that struck you as notably more ignorant than Chronus’s or Shodan’s? I’m wondering why I’m being singled out when I was just agreeing with what two other posters had already said.
Although in fairness to those two gentlemen, it’s entirely possible that in this post I’ll reveal some great ignorance that is unique to me.
Okay, so why does baseball have that “three strikes and you’re out” rule? I’ll accept for the sake of argument that baseball must have some sort of strikeout rule, but what is the unassailable logic behind the choice of three strikes rather than four? It seems like an arbitrary decision that’s been maintained out of tradition, but if there’s really a plain, factual, and perfectly sensible reason why the rule specifies three strikes then I’m eager to hear it.
I don’t think the Harry Potter series would have been improved if J.K. Rowling had stopped in the middle of the first book to spell out the rule for every reasonably possible event in Quidditch, including those that would never have anything to do with the story. There are plenty of non-fiction books about sports out there for people who are interested in such things.
And during that time, the opposing team has scored 16 goals and you lose.