The problem with FPS as a spectator sport is you can't see everything at once. You only see through the eyes of one player at one point in the map. Also, with the exception of 1v1 games like quake live, watching a top level FPS player just isn't that impressive. I can watch the world championship of counterstrike and other than aim, I don't see what makes them so good, even though I've played a lot of counterstrike and understand the game well. I don't know if that's because the game just doesn't have that high a skill ceiling or if it doesn't show. Same with Call of Duty. With MMOs like Wow it's hard to see what abilities they're using visually and I honestly don't think there's that much skill in it. I can't imagine watching a Wow arena match and being amazed at how good a player is.

I don't agree with Ebert but I think he makes an interesting point. Games definitely contain art, but can a game itself be considered a work of art? Some games are actually very similar to movies or books. They may have a lot of cut scenes or written text to tell a story, beautiful 3D or 2D worlds, and characters that the player gets emotionally attached to. But this is just bringing other artistic mediums into a game. It doesn't prove that games themselves are works of art. To do that we would have to look purely at the gameplay. Take the game of Tetris. It's a great game, but has no characters or story, and is pretty much not designed to be visually appealing at all. It is all about the gameplay. We could even look beyond video games, like Chess for example. Is the game of Chess itself a work of art? I would say yes, because it is the creative work of a human being designed to evoke an emotional response. The emotion being the thrill of competition.

Technically Java isn't platform independent either. It only runs on whatever platforms Sun has released a JRE for, which is most of them. If the SDK for NaCl generates 32bit and 64bit executables for both x86 and ARM, they have at least 99% of the market covered.

Why is Apple against WebM? I know they've been pushing H.264, but do they actually have anything to gain by H.264 becoming the defacto standard instead of WebM? Wouldn't they prefer not paying royalties?

Intel can't get into anti-trust trouble simply because no one is able to compete with them. They have to be caught for specifically doing something monopolistic. I am surprised that Intel still has the power to stop companies from building x86 processors. That patent is like 30 years old now. Doesn't it expire eventually?