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/or sports:
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“It was so hard to pry this door open, and if I mess up I know the people behind me are going to have it that much harder. Because then there’s living proof. They can sit around and say, “See? It doesn’t work.” I don’t want to be their living proof.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)