A big part of the appeal of the Harry Potter books is how easy they are for kids to relate to. Even though Harry spends much of his time at a magical boarding school, the personal struggles he goes through are not foreign to real-universe kids. The schoolwork is hard, the bullies aren't always easy to deal with and his family is a nightmare. I don't believe for a second that any of this is an accident. While so much of this saga is escapist, fantasy-fulfillment for kids, J.K. Rowling certainly works hard at making readers recognize Harry's plights in themselves. No one ever grew up wanting/expecting a honest-to-goodness magic broom, but creating a universe where there are different broom models and then having your hero look longingly at the latest and best model in a store window is completely germane to adolescent materialistic desire. It removes much of the abstractness of the supernatural, brings you closer to the story and makes you care more about the characters.
Perhaps the most hip, of-today element of the fantastical Harry Potter universe is the sport of quidditch. Again, what Rowling has done is take an old standard in supernatural lore (broom riding for witches) and Poochie it up for today's kids by turning it into an athletic competition. When you throw in all the normal sports-drama components - making the team, training, strategy and the big game - you have a story that's much more close to real-life than it is to one of wizards and witches. If you're looking for a big audience, it's a really smart idea. Almost a stroke of genius. The only problem is quidditch sucks.
In even a casual introduction to the game of quidditch, it's flaws are so obvious and so great that it strips JK Rowling naked and reveals just how divorced she is from our world of muggle sports. Perhaps her greatest flaw of all is how unafraid she is to go into the specifics of the game, despite the fact that she's way out of her depth.
The general idea of a broom-riding basketball/hockey/soccer game is not unsound. The problem is introduced with the position of seeker and the hunt for the golden snitch. The objectives of having chasers get the quaffles into the goals and the seeker catching the golden snitch are completely unrelated to one another. It's as if two separate games have been clumsily welded together.
I think the notion behind the creation of the seeker position is a cheap one: to create a position for the protagonist that's extra special. The seeker is the center forward, the quarterback, the fourth leg of a relay, etc. - except ten times more important. A quidditch game only ends once a seeker catches the golden snitch. It also gives his or her team an additional 150 points. (Quaffle goals are worth 10 points each)
If you were an avid quidditch fan, your most common feeling would be one of non-satisfaction. Essays by sports columnists attacking the rules would be commonplace. The better team would often lose and the winning team would often have hollow-feeling victories. There would be numerous tales of the seeker who lost the game for his team when he foolishly caught the golden snitch, not realizing his team was down by more than 150 points at that second. The fan outrage would dwarf all complaints about the BCS polling, Amateur boxing judging and World Cup penalty shootouts combined.
JK Rowling's creation of quidditch in the HP universe obviously had merchandising dollars in mind. This is completely fair game. Milking franchises for as many revenue streams as possible doesn't automatically hurt the art. It's all in the way it's handled. And again, quidditch just sucks. But there's no need for merchandising here. You can already play quidditch at home! The NBA finals are upon us. Bring a friend over, turn on the TV and each pick a team. Then pull out a chess board and play while the game is going on. If you win the chess game, give yourself 150 points and add it to the score of whichever NBA team you picked. If that total score is greater than the number of points of your opponent's NBA team, you win! The marriage of the two contests into one makes just as little sense as quidditch.
Although not without tension in the books and movies, in practice, quidditch doesn't hold up. As soon as I read the rules in the first book, my main thought was one of sympathy for the videogame designers who would inevitably be saddled with the chore of turning this reverse-engineered-for-dramatic-purposes smorgasbord of sports ideas into an actual game. It was therefore with great surprise that I learned that the game "Quidditch World Cup" was released by Electronic Arts.
What was I missing? I just couldn't believe that a game so ill-conceived could be made to work. Well, this is how they did it. They gave each team a "Golden Snitch Bar." As you and your opponent try to score quaffle points, your bar moves toward the center. Once the two sides meet, the golden snitch is released. This is an interesting solution, but certainly is not the quidditch Rowling describes, where the elements of quaffle play and golden snitch capture are concurrent, not sequential. The book of "Sorcerer's Stone" includes a second quidditch game, which was removed from the film. In it, Harry catches the golden snitch almost immediately, ending the game before it even began. Clearly, this game could not be replicated in the Electronic Arts re-envisioned version. Since no quaffle play took place, none could be rewarded with golden snitch bar advancement.
So why all the fuss? Well, I guess it's the snooty attitude that making a game that actually works isn't important as long as the trappings are fun. I truly believe that Rowling's cursory approach to designing the game thumbs its nose at all true sports enthusiasts. It trivializes us. It says "well the silly games that you watch don't make any sense, so why should mine?" Well, they do make sense, honey. And they're important. Although not exactly the same thing, look at all the work John Madden put into his line of videogames before he'd assign his name to them. He refused to allow technological limitations deter him from making games that were true to football. And his stubbornness yielded pure game greatness. It's quite clear that the game of quidditch has been devised by a soccer mom who most likely doesn't even understand soccer.
