The football World Cup in Brazil this year showed something similar with the 'goal line technology'. When Benzema scored against Honduras, in previous years, arguments would have persisted for years about whether the ball crossed the line. Now it was over within seconds. Similar story in tennis, cricket, athletics, and a lot of other sports.
Moaning about bad decisions is part of the fun. When you can't do it, the sport does get a bit more boring.
I look forward to automated offside calls (and I would really love to modify the offside rule), and video reviews before penalty kicks (which is a really harsh and match-defining punishment, shouldn't be taken so lightly).
I like basketball, and while video reviews do sometimes detract from the flow, I think they do add some excitement (especially when a shot goes off just before the clock goes out).
No it's not. The referee is just the shortest practical path to enforce a set of rules, which are the real essence of the sport. This is why people play just fine in parks without referees.
Refs are there to enforce the rules; if the same set of rules can be better enforced by other means, referees should be replaced. Subjective referee calls are a plague on the sport, and they are a prime cause for the dismal amount of corruption in it. The sooner we can get rid of them (or at least reduce their role), the better.
Back to the subject, what I meant is that the fact that the ref has power of life and death over a game is a side effect of his role as the enforcer of rules; but we don't define the game of football as "the game where you have a referee", do we? The essence of football is in its rules, not in how they are enforced; otherwise people couldn't play it in parks without refs.
If tomorrow we could have a perfect "refbot" software that can automatically call fouls from TV with better accuracy than human referees, using it wouldn't mean that we are not playing "football" anymore -- the game would be exactly the same, only rules would be enforced without a human ref. (as a sidenote, such a refbot would wipe out a lot of corruption overnight, and I for one would welcome it with open arms -- never again should we see shambolic farces like the 2002 World Cup, Henry's and Maradona's "Hands of God", etc etc).
The participants or the audience?
I'm trying hard to imagine a world where the rules of chess are changed to turn it into a more spectator friendly sport.
Even in chess, these problems exist. Think of Bobby Fischer moaning about the cameras in 1972.
It seems to me like the easiest thing to do would be change the rules, bringing the strike zone back to what it was. It'll most likely cause outrage, but ironically you'd be going back to the way things were before. It all comes back to the fact that the reason for sports is not to perfectly follow some set of bizarre rules, its just to be entertaining.