Lamia, I think the point that the anti-Quidditch people are trying to make isn’t that the rules are arbitrary, per se, but that they’re counterproductive to anyone playing the game, besides the seeker, having a good time or feeling like they’re contributing to the team. Basically, everyone on the team besides the Seeker just kills times and scores a few points until the Seeker ends the game and gets most of the points.
A good comparison with a well-developed game is the scoring in football. A touchdown is worth 6 points, but a field goal is only worth 3. Well then, why would anyone ever even bother with field goals? Because they’re also substantially easier to get than touchdowns, and the point difference isn’t so great between them, so the kickers on the team (the ones who score field goals) feel useful.
If a touchdown was worth 100 points, no one would ever bother with field goals, and the kickers on the team would be useless.
There are further details of footballs scoring that make it even more suspenseful and make the final score less likely to be a tie, like allowing a team to try for one or two points after a TD (with two points again being substantially harder to get than one, but also being a great option in a desperate time). No one’s getting on Rowling’s back for not including that level of detail, but rather for the type of glaring error similar to making a touchdown worth 100 points when a field goal is only
worth 3.
I think if they really wanted to keep the snitch in, they could have made catching it worth 15 pts or so, such that the seeker had to be careful to try to catch while his team was ahead. But I agree that it would be better if they got rid of it all together.
It’s not just that the Snitch is worth vastly more points than the standard goals. That would be acceptable if the time and difficulty it took to catch the Snitch versus scoring a goal was balanced with the points reward. The real issue is that catching the Snitch ends the game, instantly, and furthermore this is the only way by which games are ended. Depending on the skill of your seeker and the luck of the random movements of the Snitch, the game could be over in 10 seconds, or it could last days.
This isn’t just incredibly inconvenient for the spectators. It means that catching the Snitch - or, rather, controlling when the snitch is caught - is going to be the most important aspect of your team’s strategy. Depending on the points, there will be times during the game in which your seeker’s job will be not to catch the Snitch, but to prevent the other seeker from catching the Snitch. There’s the case of when your team is trailing by more than 150 points, obviously, where catching the Snitch would lose the game for you. Less obviously, there may be times in which catching the Snitch would win you the game, but your preferred team strategy is to not catch it, because Quidditch points from each match add to your season totals. If you are beating the other team in goals and expect to continue doing so, it is in your team’s season-scoring interest to continue to rack up points for a while before catching the Snitch and ending the game.
Of course, the fact that points from each game are added to seasonal totals mean that a really severe landslide victory early in the season could leave a team with such a glut of points that they’re nearly unbeatable for the season, even if they lose every following match.
[QUOTE=Lamia]
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.
[/QUOTE]
There are lots of flaws in OUR society, lots of prejudices and stubbornness, but no game that stupidly designed is popular.
I don’t know why it’s hard for you to accept that Rowling did a bad job conceiving Quidditch and that the sport is really absurdly conceived. Rowling herself admits that sport isn’t her strong suit. She blew it. The sport is nuts. It’s okay to admit it. So what? It’s still a great book.
[QUOTE=Lamia]
I specifically asked for logical explanations for the “three strikes” rule, but interestingly enough the answers I received were based on perceived entertainment value:
[/QUOTE]
You do realize that it’s really logical for a sport to be designed to be entertaining, right? That’s perfectly logical. The rules are supposed to be designed to make the gameplay fair, balanced, entertaining, and concentrated upon the mix of skills intended to be displayed. It’s logical to design internally consistent rules that further those aims.
Of course, they aren’t always perfect, and so occasionally rules are tweaked. A hole in baseball’s rulebook was found as the result of the infamous Pine Tar Incident, and so was corrected. (If you want to see a man getting very angry, Youtube “Pine Tar Game.”) Hockey fiddles with its rules all the time in an effort to keep the game entertaining. Basketball has had to change its rules quite a lot as the physical characteristics of its players change. The logic always drives rules towards competitiveness, balance, entertainment value, and preventing the domination of a one-dimensional skill set.
I don’t believe that was the intent of Rowling’s comment there; I think the implication was that the teams were in a position to be tied for wins and losses, and therefore net points would determine the outcome. This is a common feature of European sports, most notably soccer, and so was probably where Rowling got the idea.
This isn’t a completely subjective measure. The terms “enjoyment” and “entertainment” are stand-ins for a more objective concept: competitive parity. It means that two teams of evenly matched skills should, on average, be able to put up an evenly matched game and from start to finish, there should be a reasonable chance for either team – applying all the skills required to play the game – to come out the winner at the end.
Where it breaks down is that the only skill that makes a difference (except in the occasionally anomalous game between vastly mismatched opponents) is the seeker’s skill in catching the snitch. It makes all the other skills and players essentially superfluous.
This is impossible, for any sport. If you have two evenly-matched football teams, and one happens to get ahead, and it’s now three seconds left in the game, the team that’s behind no longer has a reasonable chance of winning. They have a chance of winning, but it’s a real long shot. In every game that isn’t tied, in every sport, there eventually comes a point where the game isn’t yet officially over, but the outcome is all but certain.
Thanks for pointing out how stupid it would be to have multiple balls in play in a sport.
Now imagine that they were multiple balls in play in different games within the same sport! Now imagine if their point values were very different, and if performing a task within one brought the whole thing to an end.
It’s problematic to point to the idiosyncrasies of wizards in order to resolve this problem. It’s pure fan-wank, complete “just because” and entirely unresponsive to the question.
You’re the only one making the assertion of arbitrariness. Others have tried to explain to you why three strikes isn’t completely arbitrary. Weren’t you paying attention?
To the extent that things that don’t make much sense won’t be any fun, then I will tell you exactly that. It wouldn’t make much sense to have one strike and you’re out, because you’d have very little gameplay going on, other than the pitcher throwing strikes. It wouldn’t make much sense to have the outcome of a baseball game depending on whether or not someone hits a half- or full-court basketball shot. All the fun of trying to steal a base versus throwing someone out, the squeeze play, being able to switch hit, having command of a number of different pitches, all of that would be irrelevant and nobody would bother because you’re working very hard to earn one run or keep someone from getting one run, and then all of a sudden the game is over with a single 15 run fell-swoop basketball shot that happened somewhere else entirely. Nine irrelevant guys per team would not have much fun, and spectators wouldn’t much care whether the coach should pull the pitcher or leave him in or bring in the lefty because the other players’ big hitter would have to turn around…
This is a good response to Yookeroo’s question. People are defensive of the poor writing and ridiculous elements of the Harry Potter world because they are personally invested in the fantasy of it all. They have made the active commitment to believe things like "JK Rowling planned in advance to have Tom Riddle’s middle name be ‘Morvolo’ because it was an anagram of ‘I am Lord Voldemort’,"rather than the more parsimonious explanation that she ended up thinking it would be cool to have an anagrammatic relationship between the two names in a post-hoc fashion.
The nonsense of Quiddich doesn’t take them out of the fiction in the way that it does for me and for others because they’re willing to actively overlook it (e.g. “wizards are just weird”).
Yeah. That’s how you tell it’s like a real sporting competition.
But it does make some sense, in the context of the story. It gives Harry something “heroic” to be good at, and by making the seeker overwhelmingly the most important position in the game, it underlines Harry’s importance in the wizarding world. It’s also a pretty good counterpoint to Harry’s own self-doubts, and proves that yes, actually, he is a proper wizard and he does belong in that world.
It’s a foil that makes his experience tolerable, because he was not raised as a wizard, is academically mediocre, is frequently at a loss to what’s going on, and is never in control of his own destiny.
Again, I think those who are arguing are laying far too much stress on this actually mattering.
I understand that for sports fans and those with a knowledge of games, Quidditch makes little sense. No doubt for those versed in matters pedogogical, Hogwarts makes no sense as an educational institution, either.
I agree. If this were the only instance of clumsy, inelegant, inauthentic lazy writing in the series, I probably wouldn’t bother to join in a discussion of it.
Hang on, as I recall the name Tom Riddle first appears in book 2, and the anagram explanation also occurs later in the same book. And so it seems quite probable that she had planned it that way from the start.
I was ambivalent about the series. I thought it was a reasonably enjoyable read, which created an attractive fantasy world (a school for wizards!), but one inherently lightweight in most respects - it couldn’t really bear any sort of searching examination, and couldn’t really bear the length of the series and increasing seriousness of its tone.
That being said, that the in-series sport invented for the series makes little sense is about the least of its problems. Indeed, the fact that people take so much effort to understand it, and appear genuinely let down by the fact it makes no sense, indicates that for some, there is more to the series than I originally thought.
On the topic of Rowlings’ use of games for plot purposes, her chess game was also bogus. (I think that was in Chamber of Secrets.)
There’s a range of skill levels in chess that make it almost impossible for a good local player to beat a grandmaster.
For a kid --who has never been described as being seriously interested in chess-- to beat a being that has a human-size chess board installed in its lair is damn unlikely. And Rowlings didn’t add any details that might make it more believable (i.e. talking about Harry’s incredible spatial skills, having Harry mutter about variations of the Dutch opening, having him be in psychic contact with a better player.)
Do you mean from the start of the first book or as she was writing the second one? I was referring to those who think it was planned from the beginning of the first book.
Otherwise, who makes an anagrammatic relationship between people’s names that requires one to have “I am” in front of it? Someone makes an anagram of a statement about their name into a new name? WTF?
I get irritated about Harry Potter stuff in about the same way that I get irritated about most of Jerry Bruckheimer’s productions or about pop music. Yeah, you can include a bunch of stuff because it seems cool and clever, but if you do it at the expense of continuity or reason or to cover up for a lack of substance, it detracts from the whole thing.
I may be more animated and irritated about this because I’ve had to read through the books a couple times already, having two boys six years apart in age who both really like the books.
Except Harry didn’t play that game, Ron did. And Rowling, to her credit, did mention a couple times that Ron played wizard chess fairly well and enjoyed the game.
