[HPforGrownups] Re: The trouble with Quidditch

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 168934

From: Ken Hutchinson <klhutch at sbcglobal.net>
>won the game. That appears to have been their best game plan.
>Evidently our author isn't enough of a sports fan to see the strategic
>nuances of the game she invented. 

Bart:
That was really my major point, and why I couldn't come up with a playable Quidditch game (once again, if the Snitch scored 50 instead of 150 points, the games would be played more or less the way JKR describes it). 

Mind you, it HAS happened that obvious strategies are not readily seen. That's why you seldom see a WWI based game; there was a simple highly effective strategy which would have won the war for whoever tried it first. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on what side you were on, the generals were all too afraid that the strategy wouldn't work, and ignored it. Which means that, if you want to create a realistic WWI game, you had to artifically constrain the players from using the msot effective strategy.

It is true that we don't know if some of these effective strategies haven't been banned, kind of like the flying wedge offense has been banned in American football and rugby. 

In any case, nobody ever made a successful Harry Potter trading card game (although an unsuccessful one WAS marketed), and Electronic Arts has come out with a Quidditch video game (I don't know if it allows for multiplayer play, though). 

The other factor (which also makes this message balance more to on-topic than off-topic) is the changing flavor of the books; the educational aspects have been steadily decreasing, while the war against Voldemort has been steadily increasing, and, due to the level of mystery involved, that is difficult to turn into a game. Once book 7 is out, perhaps a topic for discussion could be a Harry Potter game that would capture the spirit of the whole series; I'll leave it to the LE's to figure that one out.

Bart

Bart