| HOL - the abbreviation for Hogwarts
OnLine - is a Hogwarts school "simulation". And how could we attempt to
live and play in the world of Harry Potter without some kind of quidditch?
The big question - *how* would this be done, online?
I was not present for the inception
of this concept, but I do know that there was a small team of people who
discussed and developed the game we play today. The majority of the game
is based on Trivia Knowledge of Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling herself,
movie information, and the like. It is "text based", played on a chat network,
commonly known as IRC - which stands for "Internet Relay Chat".
There are two teams of 7 players
each, just like in the books. The positions and their relationship to the
game came into being as the group brainstormed and discussed how online
quidditch could exist. Three Chasers are the ones who can score for their
team by battling their way through the opposing team's defenses by answering
questions correctly and quickly. The two Beaters stand ready to block opposing
chasers as the first round of defense. The Keeper defends the goal while
heading one-on-one with a chaser. And, as in real quidditch, the Seeker
is of a different world entirely. Like the other positions, he/she must
have trivia skills, as well as fast reflexes. They must also have cleverness
and the ability to think logically under pressure to solve problems.
The quaffle-play referee is the one
that controls the main game play. The ref sends out the questions for the
players to answer (and announces which players answer correctly first),
decides when a "bludger" may come into the game, and is concerned with
making certain the rules of play are followed. The snitch-play referee
only interacts with the Seekers of the two teams, and controls that part
of the game.
Quaffle and Snitch play used to be
tedious, on the part of the people that were "behind" the scenes setting
it up. Trivia questions were typed by hand (or copied and pasted). And
the "old" snitch took many hours to create. Then a person named Godrics
Ghost came along and changed all of that. He created two programs that
semi-automate things for the ref, making the game much faster and exciting
for both players and observers.
During the course of this seminar,
you will learn how to play the game. Some of you are training to be qualified
as Referees for HOL/WQL. Some of you are training to learn to use the programs
to help train your quidditch teams. Hopefully, all of you will have a better
understanding as to how online quidditch works. |