By implying that we could build a flying broomstick with sufficient flight time for a Quiddich game - you’re already violating a good number of the laws of physics!

But let’s ignore that for the moment.

The various balls that are involved in the game would be hard to replicate - they don’t seem to produce thrust - yet they move around in fast/violent ways and in a semi-autonomous manner. That SEEMS impossible because of the laws of conservation of momentum.

When the Harry Potter book craze (pre-movies) was at it’s peak - my son wanted a Quiddich video game - and there weren’t any. Since I’m a video game programmer, I thought to try to write one for him.

When you dig down into the rules of Quiddich, it’s a truly crappy sport.

Most of the time, it’s utterly irrelevant what the other players do - just the two guys who go after the golden snitch matter. This suits the narrative of the story - where there can be a team game - but our hero is always responsible for the victory…but it’s a TERRIBLE team sport.

Given the speed of the broomsticks and their likely turn radius, the Quiddich field has to be VAST…and (as we see in the movies) - the players often leave the bounds of the field and are not declared “off-side” or anything. When you do the math, and look at the size of the snitch - you’d be unable to see it unless you were quite close to it…so most of the time, the thing is literally invisible. Since it also moves rapidly, and with a mind of it’s own - it’s totally a matter of chance whether you happen to end up close enough to it - and heading in the right direction - to catch it.

I believe that for the game to be playable at all - you’d have to have the snitch actively TRY to be close to a player…and in fact, in my game, that’s precisely what I had to program into the snitch’s flight logic. If it didn’t actively try to be caught (but not too easily) - the game would never end.

But then, if that’s what the snitch does - then it’s actively deciding which team wins…which implies that the entire game is rigged.

The rules have other problems too - for example, if your team is sufficiently behind on points scored from making goals - then catching the snitch becomes a very bad idea because it ends the game. So your tactics have to switch from TRYING to catch the snitch to making sure that the other team CAN’T catch it. Since we’re told that there is literally no time limit on these games - the best strategy becomes to put all of your players into blocking the opposing team’s seeker.

As I wrote more and more of the software for a Quiddich video game - it became increasingly evident that it’s just not a viable team sport…there is no way people would get excited about it - and given some of the more incredible things you could do with self-propelled balls and broomsticks - it represents a failure of imagination on behalf of the author.

Honestly, it’s a TERRIBLE game - and while I love the Harry Potter books - I have to say that the rules of Quiddich simply weren’t properly thought through.

So even if we quietly ignore the laws of physics - it’s unplayable.