I just read the kerjillionth complaint about how the game of Quidditch from Harry Potter makes no sense, what with the game ending as the golden snitch worth BIGNUM points makes the points scored during the game proper more or less meaningless.
Kerjillion must be the magic number, because reading the familiar criticism this time made me realize that the game can be seen as perfectly sensible if we make some parallels with real-world sports.
It’s well known that the way real-world games are played changes over time. I don’t mean that the rules change–although they often do–but rather that the performance of the players change because of advance outside the game itself. Training methods improve, the professionalization of the game allows for players who’ve spent their entire lives pursuing excellence in the game, and most relevantly there are improvements in equipment. Bats are precision-engineered, as are golf clubs and swimsuits.
In Rowling’s books, we have textual evidence that there are regular and significant increases in broomstick performance, and that these improved ’sticks are available in your everyday broomshops. It’s likely that such improvements follow an exponential curve, but even if the curve is linear we know that there’ve been a couple of centuries’ worth of Quidditch play during which time broomstick engineering has been constantly advancing. We also have textual evidence that, in the past, Quidditch matches could be grueling multi-day events.
The snitch itself, meanwhile, is not just a gamepiece but is also a symbol central to a sport that itself is central to wizards’ self-identity. Knowing how wizards, per the text, tend to be traditionalists, I think it’s safe to assume that both the snitch’s design and the rules of Quidditch itself have been changed very little, if at all, over the years.
So here’s the crux of the fanwank biscuit: In the early days of Quidditch, contemporary broomstick performance was poorly matched to the performance of the snitch. The elusive gamepiece was crafty enough and speedy enough to elude even the best fliers for hours, even days, on end. With the game proper taking place in the foreground as the seekers sought the snitch, play continued long enough for teams in a typical match to score HUGENUM points while waiting for the game-ending snitch capture, which would provide a nice BIGNUM bonus that still fell well short of the total HUGENUM points scored during regular gameplay. As broomstick technology advanced, though, the snitch’s performance advantage was met and, for the purposes of a balanced game, surpassed by the performance that could be expected of a capable fliler. The rules of Quidditch are not inherently unbalanced, then, but were thrown out of whack by an outside-the-game element.