I think you guys are talking past each other. The rules don’t need to make sense, but they do need to work.
As someone who designs games for a living, I can tell you that you making a game that is predictable yet dynamic, complex but understandable, clearly limits players options but allows them the freedom of creation, defines and supports specialization and teamwork but also allows for individual excellence is extremely difficult, and most modern sports are in a constant state of tuning to incorporate evolutions in equipment and athleticism. Games that don’t evolve well tend to get eclipsed. Rowling is telling us that Quidditch is a huge deal in her world and appears to have extremely broad fan support in the wizard community, so she’s not only designing a game, but she’s telling us through context that it’s a really good game.
To say ‘I don’t like sports, and I don’t care’ is fine I suppose, but you can’t blame those of us who do care, and I think it’s lazy writing on Rowling’s part to take on a subject she doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about and not do some research to make this element of the story more believable. I wouldn’t expect her to care about game design as much as I do, but I would expect her to take it a bit more seriously than she did.
There’s no illogical rules in cricket. I don’t know why people think cricket is a bizarre game when it … isn’t. The objective of the game is pretty straightforward, and the rules are the rules one would expect to find if you designed such a game from scratch with the same objectives.
So you accept that a finite number is needed but are troubled by the seemingly arbitrary number of three? Surely you can puzzle through this, but just imagine developing the game and trying it with one strike. You’d probably get very little scoring and little action because few base runners would make it on base in the first place. Games would be exceedingly short and not much fun for players or spectators.
Okay, now imagine five strikes and you’re out. Now you’d get lots of scoring because hitters would have a wider margin of error. Considering that many people find baseball games slow and boring as they stand now, they would find a five strikes and you’re out format exceptionally long and grueling.
You can see that although it may seem arbitrary, it’s quite simple to suss out the logic, and playing the game for a little while under varying conditions would likely lead you to select three strikes because it seemed to maximize the enjoyment in terms of scoring chances and length of the game.
A baseball-quiddich would be like having the rules of baseball, but adding in this: While the nine players are playing baseball, one other player from each team compete on a basketball court nearby. They jostle over one basketball, and as soon as one or the other hit a half-court shot, their team is awarded 15 runs and the baseball game is over.
So, worrying about why there are three strikes instead of four is kind of missing the real head scratching questions about the stupidity of quiddich.
Again, nobody cares about the minutiae of quidditch, or is arguing to spell out every rule. The entire concept is so jarringly poorly conceived that it takes many people out of the reverie that a piece of fiction is supposed to create. Added to this is that Rowling is also poor about writing about the dynamics and drama within the playing of any particular match in any interesting way.
The only way it all seems to work is if you are entirely ignorant about sports and are actively committed to enjoying Harry Potter so much that you don’t care about gaps and holes and poor writing, and are willing to work very hard to actively suspend disbelief. Most fans appear to fall in the latter category and are quite content with the post-hoc explanation that one time there was this endangered bird and also wizards are weird.
But that is the point - it is a literary device, not a proposal for a new sport. Complaining about the scoring system is fine, but it meant to move the plot. As mentioned and demonstrated, I don’t know sports but I do know Harry Potter. Therefore, it doesnt bother me.
I think the true answer is that Rowling was interested in writing an entertaining story, not in actually inventing a new sport (which, as you have rightly noted, is very difficult and possibly a full-time occupation in and of itself).
The game presumably works well enough as a plot device. It doesn’t really work as a game it is true; but then, if it works as a plot device, it doesn’t really have to.
Faulting Quiddich for not being a really good game is I think simply demanding too much. It takes real genius to invent a truly good new game. She managed to invent a game that, at least, fired her reader’s sense of wonder (personally, not mine, I never really liked it); to demand that it be as good as games like Basketball to actually play is simply asking too much of the writer.
Actually, this isn’t a good enough excuse. Writing an entertaining story requires you to use plot elements that gloss at least on their faces. Quidditch fails the laugh test. You don’t have to think about it even a little bit to realize it doesn’t make any sense.
But that’s the point. It doesn’t work as a plot device. It makes all the characters behave like idiots.
It’s not unreasonable at all. Really all she had to do was take an existing game and translate it into a magical world. Frankly, the only flaw with Quidditch is the snitch. Just get rid of the damn snitch nonsense, and you have a reasonable semblance of something like soccer, hockey, or polo played on flying broomsticks. You could even keep the bludgers and the beaters.
No, because if you committed, say, five of your seven players to finding the snitch (leaving a keeper and one more defender to look after the goals), then the other team has to make the same commitment. They can’t risk your finding it too quickly.
But the whole reason Quidditch exists is so Harry can be a Seeker, and a really good one at that. Clearly Seeker is the sexiest & most visible position, and apart from the goalie, is the only solo position. Giving him any other position would have been far less impressive.
Actually just having a rule that if any other player touches the Snitch, they’re ejected from the match and their team loses 50 points would have been sufficient to explain why a “everyone’s a Seeker” strategy won’t work. Sure, the other players could help find the Snitch, but given how fast it moves finding it when your Seeker is halfway across the field is pretty pointless. It’s a shame Rowling didn’t put something like that in there.
In fact, it has not been maintained out of tradition; it wasn’t always three strikes. At once point it was five, then four (and in the early days of the sport it varied.) And there are slight variations in lower levels and variations of baseball; in most softball and slo-pitch, a foul ball counts as a third strike, which it does not in baseball.
As the game is highly developed now - it is one of the oldest organized team sports there is, after all - it is unlikely the number of strikes will need to change, but if some development were to radically alter the balance between offense and defense, they might well change it again.
Because it keeps the game balanced in terms of offense versus defense, as Hentor has explained. It is NOT tradition; it was arrived at therough experimentation with other numbers of strikes. Three strikes and four balls ensures that the game will allow scoring without making games ridiculously long; that’s the point at which the game is best balanced for the enjoyment of the players and the spectators.
There isn’t any reason you couldn’t change it, but you would affect the game in unfavourable ways, given the other conditions as presently exist.
I agree. I’ve never said she should have. However, the sport makes no sense, even on the surface.
I don’t expect Rowling to completely spell out Quidditch, just as, if the wizards had been playing baseball, there would be no need for her to spell out the infield fly rule. But her sport doesn’t work at all - not just in theory, but Rowling herself drives it into a ditch and blows up the gas tank in “Goblet of Fire” by having Viktor Krum throw a match in precisely the way a player who wanted to win never would in a way that exactly illustrates the sport’s central stupidity. As acsenray points out, Quidditch would instantly work fine if you just got rid of the snitch, threw in a time or score limit, and made Harry the best damn Chaser to come down the pike in years. You would never have to explore the precise definition of interference or the penalties for leaving the play area.
Again, I’m not saying this ruins the books. The first book is still terrific; Quidditch’s silliness is a minor inconvenience. As I’ve said before, I also can’t understand why the Weasleys are poor - it doesn’t make any sense given a plain text reading of what wizards are capable of. But that doesn’t really bother me much, either, especially when limiting oneself to the first few books. Quidditch is just an interesting hole, that’s all, and serves as an interesting jumping-off point for describing how and why sports work the way they do.
This is what I was thinking while I was reading this thread. The game is already pretty interesting for being able to encompass a three-dimensional field, and bludgers and beaters are an interesting and not-illogical hazard element. Set Harry up as a damn good beater, and you have a reflection of his character as someone who likes to protect his friends who still gets to be the Chosen One rather than just part of an effective team.
See, that’s exactly the failure of imagination that Rowling is guilty of in this case. There’s no reason why Harry couldn’t been a standout, uniquely spectacular player in a game without a snitch.
Well, except for being highly dangerous, that is. And if I recall the movies correctly, if you knock out the goalie you can pretty much score with impunity, and she just lies there on the pitch until someone catches the damn snitch. Nothing about that is logical.
Powers &8^]
I don’t agree. Perhaps it is indeed obviously foolish as a game to those who are sports fans, but it certainly wasn’t to me (or at least, any more obviously foolish than many other parts of the Harry Potter universe). In fact, many in this very thread are pointing out arguments for why it can work as a game - I don’t, in point of fact, totally agree with them, but I don’t have to, to make my point - that it may be “obviously unworkable” to those with detailed knowledge of sports, but it isn’t to the average reader.
It is the equivalent of complaining that, to any one with a knowledge of teaching methodology, the Hogwarts’ curriculum is ‘obviously’ pedagogically unsound. That could be true, but really, we are talking about a fantasy world here. It seems to be straining at gnats after having swallowed the bowling-ball of the rest of the Harry Potter universe.
The game isn’t the point. The point is the comming-of-age story, which the game merely provides as a setting - along of course with the rest of the school.
Again, that’s a matter of opinion.
Do that, and you mess with the charm it does posess - that it is truly different.
The issue here is - which is more important to the story, having a game one could actually imagine playing as a realistic game, or having something which has an “opening” like a seeker for Harry to play?
It may be the case that a different game would have been better, but it is by no means obvious.
This is a lot like what I suggested, but the overall strategy isn’t all that unheard of.
Maybe you won’t pull the entire team to find the snitch, and maybe you won’t have an entire team of snitch catchers, but how is having a goalie, 4 people straight defending, and 2 snitch catchers?
That doubles your chances of finding the snitch over the other team, plus if you have THAT many people in the box for your defense than the other team would have a hard enough time netting 16 goals.
We can all agree the rules are stupid, but it’s fun trying to get around them.
And while we’re at it, since the pitcher is the most important player in baseball, why doesn’t any team put three guys on the mound at once and have them all throw balls at the batter at the same time? It’d be really hard for the batter to hit all three, so you’d win really easily by doing that!
Or, since the goalie is the only one in soccer who’s allowed to use his hands, why not field a team composed of all goalies? Having everyone be allowed to use their hands would be a huge advantage!
The answer is that the rules say that there’s only one pitcher, and only one goalie, and only one seeker. Just like it wouldn’t count as a strike if the first baseman threw the ball past the batter, it wouldn’t count for a beater to catch the snitch.
Even if you’re only allowed one seeker, you could gain a massive advantage by putting one guy on running interference with the enemy seeker instead of scoring goals. Considering how hard it is to catch, he wouldn’t really have to do much more than buzz around him and be annoying, and your own seeker should have a monopoly on catching the thing. Probably quite quickly too, since normally the two seekers seem to get in each other’s way a lot.
Rowling is telling us that Quidditch is a huge deal in her world and appears to have extremely broad fan support in the wizard community, so she’s not only designing a game, but she’s telling us through context that it’s a really good game.
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Given what we know about the flaws of the wizard community I don’t think we need to believe Quidditch is a really good game in order to believe it’s popular with wizards. We know that the wizard community is resistant to change and that there’s a lot of prejudice towards and ignorance about Muggles and Muggle innovations. I doubt this was Rowling’s intent, I think she just wanted to make up a wacky game that kids would like, but one could conclude that wizard sports are messed up for the same reasons as wizard politics, wizard journalism, etc.
I’m not troubled by it in the least. A sport needs to have rules or else it’s just a bunch of people hanging out. Many of these rules will be arbitrary. I’m not the one trying to deny that fact.
I specifically asked for logical explanations for the “three strikes” rule, but interestingly enough the answers I received were based on perceived entertainment value:
(Emphasis mine.)
Since sports are supposed to be fun there’s nothing wrong with having rules designed to make the game more fun for players and fans. But don’t try to tell me “because people think it’s more fun that way” is the same thing as “because it’s logical/makes perfect sense”.
If you guys don’t think Quidditch sounds like any fun then that’s your right, and what’s more I agree with you. If Quidditch were real then I wouldn’t be at all interested in it. But fun is subjective, and I can easily imagine that someone might find the sport to be entertaining.
