The trouble with Quidditch

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 168872

All the talk about Ginny playing Quidditch has reminded me of something I figured out years ago:

To put it briefly, the game, if it were playable in the "real world", would not be anything like the game depicted in the novels. 

OK, I will start off by saying that, at one time, I worked in the (board) game industry (I had an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the computer game industry, but I saw the Crash of 82/83 coming, and had no way of knowing at the time that  the company that wanted to hire me would be one of the few survivors: Sierra). 

I've never been the primary designer of a commercially released game; what I have done mostly was work for hire. Mostly, what I did was mathematical analysis, looking for flaws in games. In any case, when the CoS came out, and it was clear that Harry Potter was a hit, I decided to try my hand at creating a Harry Potter game. As collectible card games were pretty hot (I had actually designed a collectible card game, but the licensor went out of business during the playtesting), I tried to figure out what would make a could theme for a Harry Potter collectible card game. And I came up with Quidditch. It was a two-player game, each player represnting a House, each team allowed to have up to 2 players from another House join in. Each team member card had its own strengths and weaknesses, but, in general, Gryffindors were strong on offense but weak on defense, Hufflepuffs were strong on defense but weak on offense, Ravenclaw was superior on team maneuvers, and Slytherin could do tricky moves and had a better chance of getting away with cheating (the Wronski Feint would have been a Slyterin move, for example). 

But there was one problem with the game, and it showed a basic problem with Quidditch, as well. I re-read the descriptions, checking to see if I was wrong, but I was not. There was a basic flaw in the game, which screwed up the playability; in the group which I belonged to, it was called a "Paradise Planet" after a game which had the same flaw, which, luckily, was easily eliminated. It is a single factor in a game that is so overwhelming that it takes over the game. In Quidditch, it is the Seeker. 

There is a probably true story told about the making of the Lord of the Rings movie. The armies were computerized, but they created an artificial intelligence system where the individual soldiers, although largely the same, would have small differences from each other, which would alter their reaction on the battlefield, and make it more realistic. They put it together, and tried out the Battle of the Five Armies using it. The result: All the fighters, upon reacting to what they were facing, turned around and ran away. In order for the book to work, for all intents and purposes, the warriors had to be insanely brave. 

The basic problem in Quidditch is that there are just too damned many points for catching the Golden Snitch. It is admitted that the team that catches the Golden Snitch is almost never the loser. A logical strategy would be to ignore the Chasers, and have the Beaters go against the opponent's Seeker. As long as it's not a VERY lopsided game, the team that caught the Snitch first would win, and therefore the proper strategic place to put your efforts is making sure the other team does NOT catch the Snitch, and hope that your Chasers and Keeper won't get TOO far behind. I know that some of it comes from Cricket strategy (where, under certain circumstances, a team can increase its chances of winning by purposefully playing badly), but, using computerized brute force techniques, I calculated that catching the Snitch should be about 50 points, not 150, to keep the Seeker strategically important but make the Chasers and Keepers sufficiently important that they cannot be ignored. 

My best guess: JKR wanted to make the Seeker the most important player on the team, and didn't bother to do the math to see that he was the ONLY important player on the team. 

Bart