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).