“Any passing Slytherin will do” – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

[As with previous Harry Potter games, I have donated the total I’ve paid for Order of the Phoenix media including this game to a British charity supporting trans people, as some kind of offset to this post prolonging the reach, by however little, of a series by a leading campaigner against trans people’s human rights.]

**Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix** (EA, PlayStation 2, 2007)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a turning point for the book series. It was where it became apparent that Goblet of Fire had not been an aberration, but a diluted taste of what was to come. It was going to be endless unedited navel-gazing from now on: hundreds of pages of interminable teen angst at a time, and little more opportunity for invention. When it came to the film of the book, things were a little more business as usual. And for the video game, it was a turning point in a different way.

There are a few reasons why EA might have been inclined towards making a particular additional effort with this game. One was trying to reverse the diminishing returns of the directionless meandering the series had taken to this point. There was a last chance to capitalise on an established audience of PS2 players. Another was, conversely, the factor of Nintendo’s extremely popular new console with a controller which had rather a lot of the magic wand about it, and a new casual audience for the taking. What EA ended up making suggests that the fact of the book and film’s unsuitability for adaptation also presented an opportunity of its own, to break free of the constraints of following them.

The game squashes most of its intersections with the plot of the book and film into awkward sections at the beginning and end. In between, it takes the single element of recruiting members for the school resistance club (‘Dumbledore’s Army’) and spins most of a game out of it. Or rather, it uses it as an excuse to make exploring Hogwarts school most of a game. Exploring Hogwarts was in fact where the series, before years of beans and poor imitation of Lego Star Wars, had started off. But Philosopher’s Stone interspersed its exploration with a simplified linear Zelda. Order of the Phoenix doesn’t intersperse it with anything much, freeing you up to visit the full grounds almost right away. Perhaps the success the previous year of Canis Canem Edit, another open-world game set in a gothic school, was an inspiration too.

In doing so, it provides a focus which the series had sorely lacked. Its Hogwarts, carefully recreated from the films and their models, is an impressive sight. The moving staircases constantly rearranging themselves look a bit of a health and safety nightmare, but bring a genuine sense of magic. There are enough other students around to give some of the feel of a bustling school, at least until the third time you hear “Slytherin for the cup!” and realise just how few people and their lines are being repeated.

Order of the Phoenix also finally manages to make the Marauders’ Map into the game asset it always seemed meant to be. You see the whole place laid out, select who or where you want to go to, and then get directions there provided by magical footsteps on the floor ahead of you. It’s a really neat idea and adds a spring to just going backward and forward between places.

There are a few spells to use for various puzzles, simplified by being assigned to flicks of the right stick. That means you can busy yourself fixing statues and lighting lanterns, and the openness and freedom to not bother makes it more attractive, somehow. The puzzles for recruiting comrades don’t get much more complicated. In some cases you literally just have to follow the magic footsteps and talk to someone, in fact. Easy and straightforward can have their own charms, and the main part of Order of the Phoenix has enough beauty to bring them. Of course, even something as light as it is can’t avoid having something to say, intentional or otherwise.

Before looking into that, let’s talk about what hangs over playing any Harry Potter game now. When I wrote about Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone at the start of 2021, I did not feel like I could do so without addressing JK Rowling’s public transphobia. Those now look like the good old days; the acceleration of radicalisation since has been rapid. Back then, I called her “a leading transphobe” mostly in reflection of the high profile she was accorded as a result of her other work. It’s now more literal given her role publicising meetings of the country’s other top promoters of transphobic hate, and she’s also become increasingly comfortable in supporting people who are open with their homophobia.

Her role is even worse in the wider context of the UK as TERF Island. At this point JK Rowling is, to use a games-adjacent comparison, like Milo Yiannopoulos c. 2014 if he had the clout of people calling him the generation’s best writer and if politicians were being questioned on the radio about their stances on ethics in video game journalism. I can’t imagine engaging with anything Harry Potter now without thinking about that along the way and the insights it provides into how she got here.

In Order of the Phoenix, the one-liners you get from students as you walk around are determined along house lines, the structure of the four types strictly applied. One Slytherin student’s speech is a clear summary of the case against them and their smug position: “I’m going to get a job at the Ministry when I leave. Father’s so well connected. It’s a shame for those people with lesser parentage”. They are them who look down on others, and you can tell thanks to their house. Which they don’t get to choose. Their privilege is one-dimensional; they revel in it, and deserve whatever comes to them for that. At one point the main characters are considering how to try out their new attack magic and the suggestion comes that “any passing Slytherin will do”.

More striking still is the storyline around Harry’s friends Ron and Hermione becoming prefects. It was dropped from the film, but makes it more extensively into the game than even the book. You have to ask a first-year a question and Ron follows it up with a spot of casual bullying. “You passed my prefect test. Now move it, midget”. At another point he takes it further: “the midgets need to show a little respect”. Elsewhere he asks if gargoyles are all mental, and of course there’s calling Luna Lovegood barmy. Basic respect as a person is something that needs to be hard-earned from the in-group.

From my own experience of school at a similar time, none of these sound particularly unbelievable. In fact, for full realism, there should probably be much worse. But this is not the kind of fiction to go full realism on its schoolchildren and plenty of other stuff is excluded. Casual cruelty and ableist slurs from the heroes, though, aren’t even questioned in-narrative. JK Rowling is unlikely to have written the lines, but Ron uses “midgets” in the book too and she was close enough to the game to request changes in who gives particular quests, so it’s not unreasonable to think she could have read them and didn’t see a problem with our heroes saying them. Why would she, when the unquestioning celebration of any and all actions of the valiant and brave us against the sly and wicked them is so central to the mindset of the series. All are assigned their categories, visibly marked out on their uniforms, so you can always tell.

The game is clearly derived from JK Rowling’s work and exists because of that work’s success. However, there’s not much in what’s best about the game which comes from that alone, rather than from film-makers and game developers and just the concept of a slow-paced game set in an old magical school. In an alternate universe with the necessary conditions for a big-budget game adaptation of The Worst Witch to exist, there’s no reason that game couldn’t be good in exactly the same ways. But playing Order of the Phoenix now, it’s all too apparent that plenty of the game’s worst moments can be traced straight to Rowling’s own worldview.