As Harry Potter fans know, during a game of Quidditch the player known as the Seeker desperately tries to capture a small flying ball called the Golden Snitch. When the Seeker succeeds, he scores a whopping 150 points for his team and the game ends.

Meanwhile, there’s all this other frenetic and suspiciously pointless Quidditch-related activity going on. Aside from the Seekers, each team has six others players (dubbed Chasers, Beaters and a Keeper) who fight over an entirely different ball (the Quaffle) and try to get that ball through small hoops at ends of the field.

If they succeed, they score a mere 10 points and the game continues.

Author J.K. Rowling established these wildly unpractical rules for her alleged team sport in her first Potter book and she likely has no regrets. Since the Seeker has the awesome power to (A) end the game and (B) effectively score 15 goals at once, Rowling’s narrative would have to bend over backwards to allow any character to ever take center stage during a Quidditch match except the Seeker – which, naturally, is the position played by her story’s protagonist Harry Potter.

This just goes to show why Rowling was a highly successful novelist instead of, say, a sportswriter. Just imagine a football game where one player from each team is empowered to abruptly score 15 touchdowns and send everybody home. Would you watch anything on the field other than that player?

Or, for a less hypothetical example, check out NBC’s “American Gladiators.”

Both Quidditch and “Gladiators” are highly unbalanced to invest a small portion of the game with all the power to determine the winner. But “Gladiators” proves that skewed game design is less entertaining when played for realsies.

In the current incarnation of “Gladiators,” two amateur contestants fight through about five rounds of competition against the fearsome spandex-clad, non-steroid using Gladiators.

Yet none of the early rounds actually matter.

The head-to-head final round, an obstacle course called The Eliminator, is the sole determining factor of who wins.

The game isn’t quite billed this way. The contestant who has earned the most points in the first several rounds receives a head start for the Eliminator, seeming to provide an advantage. In the episodes thus far, however, the head start has mattered little-to-none due to the length and complexity of the course.

Last week, for instance, contestant Sharaud bested contestant Andy in most of the competitions, earning a significant four-second head start in the Elminator. Then he was sluggish during the swimming portion of the Eliminator and lost by a mile.

“Gladiator” contestant Sharaud scored a bunch of Quaffle goals, in other words, but fumbled the Golden Snitch.

Last night, two contestants with head starts (one a typical 2.5, the other a whopping 9 seconds) both went on to win the Eliminator and the game. But they appeared to win by far more than their head starts.

So, in almost all cases, a contestant either gets a head start and loses anyway, or gets a head start and wins by an even greater amount of time. Either way, points earned during the early challenges don’t seem to matter and contestants are better off conserving their energy.

A second season of “Gladiators” is commencing production soon, and NBC is looking at tweaking the games. The trouble they face here is that the Eliminator is the most popular portion of the show. And there’s something anticlimactic and downright un-American about somebody bursting through that final victory wall of cushy blocks only to lose because of points.

Producers have a three options: Have the early rounds give the leading player a more significant advantage for the Eliminator. Move the Eliminator to the start of the game and use it to eliminate potential contestants, determining which players compete for the remainder of the game. Or just accept that, just as Harry Potter readers know that the Seeker is all the matters, viewers know they only need to watch the last 15 minutes of “Gladiators.” The rest is just lights, noise and fake tans.