Games and Sports
Sports, specifically Quidditch, play an important role in the Wizarding world, and in the Harry Potter series. Quidditch is a team sport played up in the air on brooms. Wizards all around the globe fanatically follow it in a similar manner to football, and the Quidditch World Cup is a major event in the wizard calendar.
Harry is a great player at Hogwarts and several Harry Potter books detail his activity on the Quidditch pitch. Harry has helped lead Gryffindor to several wins. Harry is the Seeker for his team whose role is to try to find and catch the Golden Snitch. Until he graduated from school, Lee Jordan was the commentator for the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. Contrasting all previous books, Quidditch does not appear in the final book.
Other wizard games and sports include Gobstones (a version of marbles in which the stones squirt foul-smelling liquid into the other player's face when they lose a point), Exploding Snap (a card game in which the cards explode), and Wizard Chess (in which the pieces are alive and under the command of the player). The wizarding world is also home to a number of other wizard spectator sports, such as Creothceann (a now-banned broom game from Scotland in which players try to catch rocks with cauldrons strapped to their heads), QuadPod (a popular game in the United States involving a Quaffle that explodes), and broom racing.
Read more about this topic: Harry Potter Universe
Famous quotes containing the words games and, games and/or sports:
“Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“In the past, it seemed to make sense for a sportswriter on sabbatical from the playpen to attend the quadrennial hawgkilling when Presidential candidates are chosen, to observe and report upon politicians at play. After all, national conventions are games of a sort, and sports offers few spectacles richer in low comedy.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)