Senior computer engineering major
I don’t get Quidditch.
No, I don’t mean the fictional sport portrayed in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I’m referring to the muggle-adapted version of the game that college students have been playing since its invention at Middlebury College in 2005.
When I see this university’s Quidditch team practicing on McKeldin Mall, I’m instantly perplexed by the bizarre juxtaposition of seriousness and fantasy. Players run drills and call plays with the passion of any club sports team, but all the while they straddle brooms that, outside of the wizarding world, won’t permit them to fly. This scene is not unique to College Park — more than 300 teams worldwide have registered with the International Quidditch Association, the sport’s governing body.
My first impression is that it’s a little bit silly to invest so much time and energy in a game inspired by a popular series of fantasy novels. However, I respect that many students are passionate about Quidditch, and don’t mean to suggest that these students stop participating in an activity they enjoy. Instead, I’d like to examine Quidditch as an interesting case study in the proliferation of fandoms.
The concept of a fandom, or a subculture consisting of people who are connected by their enthusiasm for a particular work of media, is far from new. One of the earliest recorded fandoms surrounded the publication of Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories in the late 19th century. Holmes devotees obsessed over the stories; they produced fan fiction and publicly mourned the character’s fictional death. Here in the present day, we see much of the same — television shows, movies and comic books with thriving, active fan communities, along with growing attendance numbers at the world’s largest fan conventions.
I’m interested in fandoms because they help demonstrate the continual blurred lines between reality and imagination. In the case of fan conventions, this gray area is most evident in cosplay, in which enthusiasts dress in elaborate costumes to take the form of their favorite characters. In the case of Quidditch, we see this in the development of a comprehensive set of rules that modify a fictional game to work without levitation.
I doubt many fans have difficulty distinguishing between their involvement in fandoms and the rest of their lives. But how much time can one spend inhabiting an imagined world before that part of life becomes more “real” than the rest? This concern is relevant to both quintessential geeky obsessions (like anime and Star Trek) and those that are more mainstream (like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad). As information technology has advanced, we’ve created worlds that are more vivid and much easier to get lost in.
Maybe we should embrace fictional worlds as refreshing alternatives to a more mundane world that might otherwise restrict us. We could interpret these constructed fantasies as a supplement to life rather than an escape from it. At the same time, perpetual abstractions from reality might be leading us to the commonly depicted dystopia where humans are consumed by technology and spend their lives in a fully virtual domain.
While I, like most people, occasionally indulge in fiction, I try my best to strike the right balance with the rest of my life. For me, signing up for Maryland Quidditch seems too extreme. But then again, in a couple days, I plan to dress up as some character and go out with friends for Halloweekend, which is really no less silly than wizard handball. To that effect, I’ll say that if it’s fun, safe and brings people together: to each his own.
Kevin Hogan is a senior computer engineering major. He can be reached at khogandbk@gmail.com.
