Orlin Wagner/AP

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach talks with a reporter in his office in Topeka, Kan., in May 2017. On the left and right, Mr. Kobach – a champion debater with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School – is recognized as a formidable force on illegal immigration.

There were a few things Jo Carolyn French wanted people to know when she took the witness stand at the US District Court in Kansas City last week – among them, that as an Arkansas teenager she picked 300 pounds of cotton a day and as a senior citizen she likes to drive her Ford Focus rocking out to Rod Stewart with her hair flowing in the wind.

Her folksy humor had both sides chuckling in an otherwise tense trial, in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging a Kansas law requiring prospective voters to show proof of citizenship.

But Ms. French stopped joking when it came to the main issue: the need to prove you are a United States citizen to vote in the state. She says she was happy, as a new resident of Kansas who had long ago lost track of her birth certificate, to produce a family Bible, a baptismal certificate, and her high school transcript in order to be able to register to vote.

“I was hurt that no one believed me that I was an American citizen,” said French, a white resident of Osage City, Kan., who was called to testify by the defendant, Secretary of State Kris Kobach – whose office helped her prove her citizenship. “But that is the one thing that Kansas has that every state should have – [requiring] proof that you belong here.”

Currently, Arizona is the only other state to require proof of citizenship to register to vote – a requirement that supporters say is necessary to protect the integrity of American elections and which critics portray as a racist attempt to disenfranchise citizens who are poor, less educated, and come from minority or immigrant backgrounds.

At its heart, the Kansas trial represents the clash of two opposing visions for the United States: one that says it is intent on preserving the Constitution and, some would add, white Christian America. And another that says it is trying to help the Constitution live up to its stated ideals by more fully embracing all Americans and preventing tools traditionally used to keep people of color from voting during the first half of the 20th century from making a return in the 21st.

Trial testimony, which wrapped up Monday, has garnered national attention. On its face, the idea of voter ID and proof of citizenship laws strike some Americans, especially on the right, as common sense protections. People on the left say that ignores the history of how such laws were used during the Jim Crow era. The trial, which Mr. Kobach appears likely to lose, also shows how policy that plays well in the court of public opinion can face a very different outcome in a court of law.

“Secretary Kobach is a controversial lightning rod because he champions some controversial policies,” says Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “He takes issues that many people have reasonable concerns about, and tends to runs to the extreme on them.”

‘Mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right’

The Kansas legislature passed the Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) law in 2011 – by 111 to 11 in the House and 36 to 3 in the Senate. “It is my hope that other states will enact the Kansas model,” said Kobach at the time. “Voter fraud is a national problem, and Kansas has offered a solution that will protect every state that adopts it.”

A number of states have added some form of voter ID requirements in recent years, including neighboring Missouri. Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft says the measures have not only increased voter confidence but also enabled some people to vote who wouldn’t have been able to before the new law took effect in June 1, 2017.
“As a politician it’s really easy to think a good election is whether your side wins or loses, but it’s really about whether the voting public makes the decision,” he says in a phone interview.

While most states that have enacted new voting laws have focused on proving identity, rather than citizenship, the two are close cousins, says Ethan Corson, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party and a lawyer who challenged the Wisconsin voter ID law. “I think this is very much the new Jim Crow – this is a deliberate attempt to exclude black, Latino, poor voters,” says Mr. Corson, who describes it as a GOP effort to thwart voters who don’t generally support Republicans.

Joy Springfield, an African-American attorney in Kansas City attending the trial says she feels like Kansas’s approach to voter ID is an attempt to roll back the civil rights gains since Selma.

A key focus of the trial against the law has been whether the incidence of noncitizen voting was high enough to justify the requirement to produce documentation such as a birth certificate or passport.

The state of Kansas, which has 1.8 million registered voters, has found 129 incidents of noncitizens registering or attempting to register since 2000. Of those, 11 voted. The ACLU, meanwhile, estimates that more than 30,000 citizens were unable to vote due to the law, which was implemented in 2013.

Among them was Steven Wayne Fish, a plaintiff in the case, a white resident who got his Kansas driver’s license more than 20 years ago. When renewing it in 2014, he decided to register to vote for the first time over concern about school budgets. When he showed up to vote, he was told he was not in fact registered because he had not shown proof of citizenship. He has lost track of his birth certificate and doesn’t have a passport.

In October 2016, the Tenth Circuit issued a preliminary injunction requiring Kobach to suspend implementation of the law pending the trial outcome, ruling that, “There is no contest between the mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right and the modest administrative burdens to be borne by Secretary Kobach’s office and other state and local offices involved in elections.”

Kobach: ‘The ACLU’s worst nightmare’ 

On the left and right, Kobach – a champion debater with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School – is recognized as a formidable force on illegal immigration.

Mother Jones called him the legal mastermind behind a wave of anti-immigration laws. Mitt Romney referred to him as a true leader. Others have held him up as an American hero.

Kobach calls himself “the ACLU’s worst nightmare.”

As an ambitious young Republican, Kobach worked in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department during George W. Bush’s presidency. Fifteen years later, he drafted a plan for Trump, obtained in court by the ACLU, advocated for “Draft[ing] Amendments to the National Voter Registration Law to promote proof-of-citizenship documents” – a move that would have expanded the scope of Kobach’s mission well beyond Kansas.

But he did have an impact on the Trump administration, persuading the president that millions of illegal voters had lost him the popular vote. He served as the vice chair of the president’s commission on electoral integrity, which was disbanded in January amid numerous lawsuits and lack of cooperation from states.

Citing citizens’ right to privacy, even Mississippi’s Republican secretary of State refused to comply with the commission’s requests for voter data, remarking, “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

Now Kobach is running for governor.

“Those who have ears up are definitely concerned that a person with such seemingly outright racist views would be elected governor,” says Beth Seberger, a former ESL teacher for refugees who attended nearly every day of the trial.

But others see Kobach as a strong defender of American ideals.

“I believe in our Constitution, I believe in the rule of law, and I believe that citizens of the United States should be able to vote,” says Renee Slinkard, a supporter of the Kansas voter ID law who says she recently helped a green-card holder from Vietnam pass his US citizenship test. “I do not believe that someone who ... has not come over here the legal way should be voting.

Defense picked apart by prosecution

Kobach’s defense in the trial, which began March 6, relied on witnesses including GOP pollster Pat McFerron, political scientist Jesse Richman of Virginia’s Old Dominion University, and Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington.

By analyzing Census data, surveys, polls, and voting records, they aimed to demonstrate two main points: 1) that while the number of known instances of noncitizens registering or attempting to register to vote is 129, when those instances are taken as percentages of the total population, it can be extrapolated that there are as many as 18,000 noncitizens who have attempted to register in Kansas and 2) that the 2011 SAFE act did not substantially diminish voter turnout in the 2014 elections.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys picked apart those witnesses’ credentials and data analysis, arguing that they had not controlled for relevant variables and thus had obtained skewed results. They also argued that more than 30,000 citizens had been unfairly prevented from registering to vote.

“While we certainly don’t condone people who aren’t eligible voting, when you’re talking about many multiples of that of people who are eligible to vote who aren’t getting to the ballot, there’s no question where the balance falls,” says Neil Steiner, an attorney with the New York firm Dechert LLP who is working pro bono on this trial alongside the ACLU, as he did on a case challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

But for supporters of the Kansas statute, a law is a law – and should never be broken.

“Cite another law for me [where the attitude is], ‘Well, it’s OK, because there are only a few people breaking it,’ ” says Joe Kessinger, a corporate finance consultant and GOP voter from the Kansas City area who came to observe the final day of testimony. He argues that such a standard would never be applied to bank robbery or Russian hacking into the electoral system.

The proceedings were often characterized by a tone of disdain – with the defense showing persistent frustration with the plaintiffs’ line of questioning, which sought to portray witnesses as biased against immigrants and minority citizens. At one point, Dr. Camarota of CIS, whose organization came under attack during cross-examination, protested that the Southern Poverty Law Center – which classifies CIS as a hate group and was referenced by the prosecution – routinely targets people it disagrees with and “tries to taint them with some sort of racist brush.”

“Plaintiffs contend that the defense position is not only constitutionally problematic, but also that it’s racist,” says Kansas attorney Bradley Schlozman, who filed an amicus brief early in the case and previously served in the civil rights division of the Bush administration’s Justice Department. A DOJ investigation in 2009 found that he illegally hired attorneys based on political credentials and made false statements during sworn testimony to Congress. That pattern was later reversed by the Obama administration. “They’re just trying to demonize the states and individuals who are promulgating voter integrity measures.” (Editor’s note: This paragraph was corrected to clarify that Mr. Schlozman’s statement refers to the plaintiffs’ contention, not his own view.)

Judge Julie Robinson, a Bush appointee and the first African-American woman to preside over a US District court in Kansas, said she would take at least a month before rendering a decision.

Manuel Rueda

Andrés Carrizales, a Venezuelan migrant now living in Colombia, photographed in Bogotá on March 18, 2018. Mr. Carrizales ran a small soap and shampoo factory at home. Now he works as a security guard in Bogotá's Central Cemetery.

When Yenisel Perez arrived in the Colombian capital last summer without any savings, she managed to find work – but only for $5 per day. The small barber shop where she styled hair was one of the few places willing to hire an undocumented worker like herself.

But the Colombian government’s recent decision to grant residence permits to some Venezuelan migrants has broadened her horizons. Now, Ms. Perez works in a fancier salon near the city’s airport, where office workers come in for pedicures, or to flat-iron their hair. She says she’s earning three times as much as in her previous job, and has saved enough to bring her 21-year-old son over from Venezuela.

“I have more options now” says Perez. “The beauty salons in the [wealthy] north of the city all demand that you have proper working papers. It was a part of the city that was shut down to me before.”

Colombian officials say at least 300,000 Venezuelans fled here last year, escaping poverty, hunger, and violence as inflation under the government of Nicolás Maduro soared to 6,000 percent and democratic institutions declined. Tens of thousands more have settled in other South American countries like Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina in what has become one of the world’s most massive migration events.

With no end in sight, Colombia and other countries in the region are now trying to come up with more long-term policies. So far Colombia, where the bulk of Venezuelans have arrived, has taken a “hesitant” approach, according to Laura Gil, an international relations expert and United Nations consultant based in Bogotá. There have been some steps to better integrate newcomers, and others to keep them out in the first place.

The government has stopped issuing border crossing permits that allowed Venezuelans to stock up on supplies and return, for example, and is increasingly deporting those who are in the country without papers. But it has also implemented measures to legalize migrants already in Colombia, many of whom had overstayed their short-term permits, in an effort to benefit them and their host country alike.

“We have become a big laboratory for immigration policy that could provide the world with some lessons,” says Ronal Rodríguez, a political science professor at Bogotá’s El Rosario University. “This is a population that will spend at least the next decade here…. Faced with the dimensions of this crisis, we will have to come up with creative solutions to this problem.”

Work benefits

Last year, Colombia’s government decided to grant two-year residence permits, known as PEP, to Venezuelans who had arrived in the country before July 28. Early this year, it extended the same permits: Venezuelans who legally arrived in the country before Feb. 2, with no criminal record, can now apply for temporary residence.  

Christian Krüger, the director of Colombia’s national immigration service, has said the temporary residence permit helps keep people out of the shadows, and makes them less vulnerable to employers who would try to exploit their status as undocumented workers.

He also said in February that Colombia wants to “help” Venezuelans who are chafing under the country’s economic crisis.

“We cannot forget that we were in a similar situation a couple decades ago,” Mr. Krüger said in a February press conference – referring to the hundreds of thousands of Colombians who fled to Venezuela, Ecuador, and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s to escape decades of fighting between guerrilla groups, right-wing death squads, drug gangs, and the government.

But Colombia may also benefit. By providing residence permits, the government can keep better track of how many Venezuelans are actually in the country, and who they are. Previously, Ms. Gil says, “even at the border bridges there were no proper checkpoints to see who is coming in and who is leaving”: people passed through a supermarket-style turnstile after showing ID to an immigration officer. Work permits may also make economic sense – Venezuelans who are now legally employed will have to make social security payments, offsetting some of the health care costs that their influx has created.

“As we improve our capacity to legalize foreigners who are in our country, we will be able to plan for the future,” Krüger says.

Walking a 'fine line'

But for many Venezuelans, the new rules are still far from ideal. The residence permits are only being given to Venezuelans who arrived in Colombia with their passport before the required date. Thousands have entered without them, in part because paper and ink shortages in Venezuela have made new passports increasingly difficult to obtain. The process can take months, and many Venezuelans say they have needed to bribe officials in order to receive one.

“The government will have to find other ways to legalize Venezuelans who stream into the country,” says Professor Rodríguez, an expert on Venezuela. He also notes that the current residence permits only last two years, and Colombia will have to come up with new solutions for Venezuelans who still want to stay after that.

“Incoming governments will have to make tough decisions on immigration policy,” he says.

Gil says that Colombia is walking a “very fine line,” and too many benefits may generate even more immigration.

The incoming waves of Venezuelans seeking medical help has already put a strain on Colombian hospitals. Many come into the country with little cash and sleep on the streets of border cities, which has created tensions with police and local residents.

Poised to grow?

In February, President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the government would no longer issue short term border-crossing permits, used by Venezuelans who live near Colombia to enter for food, supplies, and medical care. Those permits, the government said, were being used too often to work in Colombia illegally. Mr. Santos also increased the number of border patrol officers, in what he described as an attempt to stop the smuggling of goods and people.

It might not be enough to stem migration, however. The International Organization for Migration estimates that the number of Venezuelans leaving their country for other parts of the continent has increased sevenfold in just three years. Colombia’s government estimates that the number of Venezuelans living there doubled over the past year, from 300,000 people to 600,000.

“When you are in a desperate position and need to feed your family, you migrate, even if you don’t have the proper documents,” says Andrés Carrizales, who arrived in Colombia last year. Mr. Carrizales, who now works in Colombia legally as a cemetery security guard, says he wants to bring his wife and daughters from Venezuela, but is waiting for them to get a passport, which he says is fiendishly difficult.

Ultimately, Colombia and the wider region will have to work together to find solutions, Gil says, such as a joint fund to finance humanitarian assistance, or a job bank where countries could list the type of labor they need. Peru has also issued temporary residence permits for Venezuelans, and Argentina has made it easier for them to apply for residency. Panama has moved in the opposite direction, toughening entry requirements.

Perez, the hair stylist in Bogotá, says that as long as the current government is in power, she will not return to Venezuela. She expects other family members to make the same decision.  “I have to take care of my two daughters and put them through school,” she says. “In Venezuela that was no longer a possibility.”

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

William Bondshu spends the evening phone banking at the headquarters of Flip the 49th: Neighbors in Action, March 14, 2018, in Carlsbad, Calif. The goal, he says, is to get people out to vote and help Democrats in their bid to retake the majority in the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections. "I’m talking to as many people as I can, knocking on as many doors as I can," says Mr. Bondshu, a sales manager. "If we all keep our heads down and focus on building that energy, the wave will take care of itself."

When Conor Lamb won the special House election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district last week, William Bondshu cheered.

Like many Democrats across the country, Mr. Bondshu saw the win as a sign that voters in the party could transform their grievances against the Trump administration into political change – and retake the majority in the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections.

“It was so invigorating,” says Bondshu, a sales manager and community volunteer in Carlsbad, Calif. “That you can get a Democrat into a seat despite the demographics of that seat is a mountain moved.” (Pennsylvania’s 18th voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in 2016.)

Mr. Trump’s effect on energizing liberals has been widely documented. People who’d never given politics a second thought – including thousands of women, minorities, and scientists – began taking to the streets, calling their representatives, and running for office. Elections that have taken place since 2016 have favored Democrats. The frenzy has led to forecasts of a “blue wave” in November that could hand Democrats the House.

But while all that energy is a positive sign for the party, there are some potential downsides to the fervor. Many congressional races are fielding unwieldy numbers of candidates, which can drain resources and splinter voter support – or in some cases, lead to outright rifts. Inexperienced candidates, who could squeak by in a crowded field, add another layer of risk.

The challenge is particularly acute in California – ground zero in the Democrats’ efforts to win back the House. The state boasts an unusual “jungle” primary system that promotes the two candidates with the highest share of votes to the general election, regardless of party. Having too many Democrats on the ballot could lead to a scenario where the votes are so spread out on their side that two Republicans squeeze past them.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

A volunteer makes phone calls urging residents to vote during the June 5 primary at the headquarters of Flip the 49th: Neighbors in Action on March 14 in Carlsbad, Calif. Neighbors in Action is a super PAC dedicated to supporting efforts to get out the Democratic vote in California's 49th district, one of seven key seats Democrats are targeting in their bid to retake the majority in the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections.

“Are we going to see Democratic turnout in a midterm on a level that hasn’t been seen in years? That’s an important question,” says Bob Shrum, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “In California, are Democratic candidates going to make it through the initial primary in districts they can win? Maybe there will be an [external] event that no one has predicted that affects the election.”

“All these are uncertainties – and the uncertainties matter,” he says.

A slew of challenges

Nationwide, Democrats still face a slew of challenges in their bid to flip the House. Already, strategists are warning about the dangers of overconfidence – something the party learned about the hard way in 2016. Another oft-heard concern is the lack of a coherent message other than opposition to the Trump presidency.

“I don’t think [Democrats] will win if all they do is be against Donald Trump,” says longtime political observer Phil Trounstine, former editor of the San Jose Mercury News and publisher and editor of politics website Calbuzz.com. “They need to have a truly positive message that’s going to [contrast] with Trump’s chaos.”

Democrats will also have to manage tensions between the party’s centrist, “establishment” wing and its energized progressive bloc. Hostility during the primaries risks splitting the Democratic voter base and forcing candidates to spend more than planned just to get on the general ticket. It also could turn off potential voters in both the primaries and the general election – and voter turnout, observers say, is the single most important factor in winning the House.

This is especially true in districts where Democrats are trying to unseat a Republican incumbent. “It’s always more difficult to beat an incumbent, because they have money, resources, and the power of office behind them,” Mr. Trounstine says.

Notably, some of the recent wins for Democrats have come from candidates who cast themselves as centrists, willing to cross party lines. In Pennsylvania, Mr. Lamb ran as a conservative Democrat who said he would not vote for Nancy Pelosi as party leader. His primary focus was on labor issues, in a district where the steel, coal, and natural gas industries have long held sway.

It’s been widely noted that Lamb benefited from the fact that he was essentially selected by state party leaders, and did not have to run in a primary – where he might have been forced to move more to the left. Most candidates won’t have that luxury.

Indeed, an effort earlier this month by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to discredit progressive candidate Laura Moser in Texas – who was one of seven Democrats competing to take on a Republican incumbent in a suburban district outside of Houston – clearly backfired. Ms. Moser is now one of two Democrats competing in a May runoff.

The importance of California

California, in some ways, presents a microcosm of the road ahead for Democrats. Here, seven House districts currently held by Republicans went to Hillary Clinton in 2016, offering Democrats their biggest opportunity in the effort to recapture the 24 seats necessary for a majority.

“This is Ground Zero in the fight to get the House back,” Democratic strategist Bill Carrick says.

Bondshu’s home district, California’s 49th, is one of the top targets for Democrats nationwide. Incumbent GOP Rep. Darrell Issa has announced he won’t be seeking reelection (at least not in the 49th), after barely winning in 2016 in a district that voted for Hillary Clinton by 7 points. The Cook Political Report currently rates it as “leaning Democratic.”

But with four viable Democratic candidates running in the state’s June 5 primary, it’s entirely possible they could split the vote and lock the party out of contention.

“That’s something none of us want,” says Ellen Montanari, lead organizer for Flip the 49th: Neighbors in Action, a grassroots group where Bondshu volunteers.

Rifts have already surfaced between Democratic candidates Mike Levin, who’s received endorsements from local party representatives, and Doug Applegate, who’s running on a more progressive platform. Last fall, Mr. Levin’s campaign called out Mr. Applegate for his weak fundraising “despite the fact that Applegate ran in 2016 and should have had a ready-made donor base at his disposal.” Applegate’s camp struck back, questioning Levin’s environmental record.

“We’re not going to slide into June with a friendly race, this is clearly going to escalate,” Applegate’s campaign manager, Cody Peterson, told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The bickering has added a flavor of anxiety to the excitement over recent Democratic successes. “I’m hopeful and nervous at the same time,” says Ms. Montanari.

Still, the volunteers who showed up Wednesday night to the organization’s headquarters in Carlsbad – an idyllic coastal city just north of San Diego – refused to be distracted. For more than two hours they worked the phones, informing Democratic voters about the primary.

“Everything is about letting people know there’s an election and they need to vote,” Dylan Bry, a local resident and small business owner, says between calls. “That’s the only thing that will change any of this.”

“I’m talking to as many people as I can, knocking on as many doors as I can,” adds Bondshu, the sales manager. “If we all keep our heads down and focus on building that energy, the wave will take care of itself.”

Courtesy of Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment

Fans cheer Valiant players after their win over the Los Angeles Gladiators at the tournament in the Blizzard Arena.

Brady Girardi smiles as the next fan in line hands him a poster to sign. “You were so good tonight!” the woman gushes as Mr. Girardi scrawls his name across the page. He murmurs a thank-you and poses with her for a selfie. 

The fan, whose shock of yellow-green hair matches Girardi’s jersey, walks away with a wide grin. Girardi resumes his place with his eight teammates around a marker-strewn table set up in the middle of the same arena where earlier that night they pulled a spectacular upset against a league front-runner. The line of fans waiting for photos and autographs winds all the way up into the stands.

The trappings of the postgame meet-and-greet might sound familiar to the average sports fan. But Girardi and his team, the Los Angeles Valiant, probably won’t. That’s because the Valiant isn’t a basketball or baseball team. It’s an esports team whose players compete at the world’s highest levels in a video game called Overwatch.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Valiant players (from left) Young-seo Park, Brady Girardi, and Ted Wang greet fans and sign autographs after the team’s win over the Dynasty.

The match they just won against top contender Seoul Dynasty kicks off the closing week of the first stage of contests in the inaugural Overwatch League – a pioneering global tournament that brings together 12 teams from Asia, Europe, and the United States to compete for $3.5 million in prize money. The league’s goal: to raise competitive gaming to a level of professionalism and recognition that may one day rival that of baseball or football.

“The vision here is that someday it’ll be no different to come home and grab the family to watch an Overwatch game than it is today to grab the family and watch a Major League Baseball game,” says league commissioner Nate Nanzer, an executive for Overwatch publisher Blizzard Entertainment. 

Skeptics might scoff, but it’s not a far-fetched idea. Already the Overwatch League looks more like a traditional sports conference than any esports tournament in history. Matches are broadcast live from the Blizzard Arena, a 530-seat amphitheater with an elevated stage that features two banks of gaming computers and six massive high-resolution screens.

The league’s sponsors include not just Intel Corp. and ­Hewlett-Packard Co., but also nontech powerhouses such as Toyota and T-Mobile. Team owners, who include the likes of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, had to commit to providing players such as Girardi with housing benefits, health insurance and retirement plans, and a salary of no less than $50,000 a year.

And the Overwatch League represents just the first click of the mouse. Investors, the news media, and academia are all beginning to recognize that interactive gaming lies at a confluence of evolving technology and shifting demographics that is transforming entertainment. Consider: In 1995, about 100 million people worldwide played interactive video games. By 2016, it was 2.6 billion.

As gaming’s competitive arm, esports seems poised to extend that transformation into the realms of sport and spectacle. The night the Valiant won, hundreds of fans came to cheer their favorite teams at the arena. Never mind that it was a Wednesday and that the games weren’t even part of the season-ending playoffs.

Eventually, esports could even change what it means to be an athlete. The sports stars of tomorrow may no longer be chiseled home run hitters or deft three-point shooters. They may be gaming gurus with quick thumbs and a cunning virtual sense.

“The digital revolution has changed everything out there, and now it’s changing competition,” says Mark Deppe, acting director of the esports program at the University of California, Irvine. “Esports is the future.”

In his 2011 novel “Ready Player One” (the film adaptation hits theaters late this month), Ernest Cline depicts a dystopian future in which unemployment and energy shortages push just about everyone with a computer to seek escape in a virtual-reality video game called OASIS. Experiencing the Overwatch universe beamed in 4K resolution on the screens around the Blizzard Arena here makes it easy to imagine how large swaths of humanity might someday immerse themselves in a game.

Players such as Girardi – known to fans and insiders by his online tag, “Agilities” – approach their profession with seriousness. The 18-year-old would be the first to say he’s fortunate to get to play video games for a living. He also talks about his professional gaming career the way a talented teenage basketball player might have viewed getting a shot at playing in the National Basketball Association (NBA) a generation ago: as improbable but not inconceivable.

“I did want to go to college and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life after I was done with high school. But I never got to that point,” says Girardi, who was 16 when he moved to Los Angeles from his hometown in Lethbridge, Alberta, after signing on with Immortals, the Valiant’s parent company. “Video games happened, so this is my job now.”

Girardi’s teammate and fellow Canadian Stefano “Verbo” Disalvo went a step further. As soon as he realized that top players could make millions in tournaments such as the championship series for League of Legends – the most played PC game in the world – he decided that gaming was his calling. When Overwatch was released in early 2016, Mr. Disalvo devoted countless hours to the game, improving his skill. Playing became a source of friction with his mother. But it paid off: In the fall of that year, Immortals offered him a yearlong contract on its Overwatch roster. “My dream came true right there,” Disalvo says.

 Just a decade ago, the idea of making a reliable living in esports would have been laughable. Big-name investors were scarce. Tournament organizers struggled to muster prize pools. Almost everyone who ventured into the scene – whether players, tournament coordinators, or commentators (known in esports as “shoutcasters”) – did it out of love for gaming with little guarantee of a payout. 

“Back in the day, you’d pay your own way [to tournaments]. You’d bring your own computer,” says Susie “lilkim” Kim, an esports veteran who got her start in the industry by interpreting English and Korean matches for broadcast in the mid-2000s. “It was a hobby thing. It wasn’t a job.”

The launch in 2011 of Twitch – a streaming service and live chat forum dedicated to gaming – brought players and esports fans together online in a way that allowed for real community building. Esports tournaments have since sold out venues such as the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Madison Square Garden in New York, and KeyArena in Seattle. Dedicated esports arenas are being built in Las Vegas and Oakland, Calif. By 2016, worldwide revenues for esports stood at $660 million – still a fraction of what the National Football League makes, but the figure is expected to swell as advertisers and investors catch on. 

Monthly esports viewership also more than doubled between 2013 and 2016, from less than 80 million to more than 160 million. The majority of that audience was 35 or younger.

The average NFL viewer is about 50.

Sitting in the stands at an Overwatch match with Noah Whinston is like sitting in the stands with any other dedicated 23-year-old esports fan: He groans when one of his team’s characters gets killed, frets nervously when the players maneuver a difficult play, and cheers madly when they win a round. The difference is that this particular fan also happens to be chief executive officer of one of the teams battling it out onstage. 

“I know I said I’m not emotionally invested in my team’s success and failure,” he says after the Valiant narrowly escapes attack, “but I am very emotionally invested in my team’s success and failure.”

Mr. Whinston’s career began in college, where he was a casual gamer and fan who made a name for himself winning prize pools in fantasy esports leagues. The way that tournaments were structured, however, bothered him. “No team was earning my loyalty or earning my lifetime fandom,” Whinston says.

He decided to try to fix that. In 2015, he bailed on his senior year as a political science major at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., to start Immortals in San Francisco. It was perfect timing: Just months after Whinston launched the company, Sacramento Kings co-owner Andy Miller and retired NBA player Rick Fox, among others, started investing in the sport.

Yet Whinston’s vibe – with his college dropout cred, metal-frame glasses, and unassuming grin – is more start-up geek than sports executive. And in many ways the same is true for esports in general: Its essence has always been more Comic Con than Super Bowl. 

“We’re all still kind of nerds at heart,” Whinston says. 

In managing his teams, he blends that techie spirit with Blizzard’s vision of professionalism and stability. The Valiant, along with two other esports teams under the Immortals brand, practices at a converted apartment complex in Culver City, Calif., where Whinston moved the team in late 2015. Each team has its own training room outfitted with state-of-the-art PCs and gaming chairs. Coaching staff includes a sports psychologist in charge of player performance. Meals, designed with both taste and nutrition in mind, are catered for staff and players.

Immortals is also the first to move away from the conventional esports housing model, in which players live and work together in one space. In the early days of esports that meant cramped apartments with mattresses in one room and computers in another. Today professional gamers either live and work in lavish complexes, with amenities such as basketball courts and swimming pools, or commute to separate work sites altogether. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Los Angeles Valiant player Brady Girardi (c.) works on his gaming skills at an esports training facility in Burbank, Calif.

“You need to make sure that the environment they exist in is conducive to being a healthier person,” says Whinston. “When you are working, you’re here, and you are not working anywhere else.”

What Whinston takes most to heart, however, is Blizzard’s ambition to turn the Overwatch League into the first successful esports conference. He wants it to operate similarly to a traditional sports league with local franchises, each with its own arena, that draw loyal fans to watch competitions. Teams would eventually play matches in true “home-and-away” fashion, traveling to Boston, Dallas, or London to take on other competitors. 

Only one other league has ever tried to establish a local following: The Championship Gaming Series in 2007, which, despite its $50 million budget, ended in disaster in the face of a global economic crisis. 

So far, Blizzard’s Mr. Nanzer says, the Overwatch League has exceeded expectations, with 10 million viewers tuning in via online streaming services within four days of opening. Blizzard Arena also sold out seats through that first week, and dozens of viewing parties took place around the world, including 62 in Europe alone. 

Until a league with many different city franchises can be established, Whinston sees a chance for the Valiant – as one of two L.A. teams – to boost local support by holding fan events, showcasing players’ personalities, and emphasizing the team’s ties to its home city. “We root for the people that we can find kinship with,” Whinston says. “The idea is if you find your people, your community, through L.A. Valiant, you’re going to be L.A. Valiant fans for the rest of your lives.”

Esports innovation isn’t limited to multimillion-dollar stadiums or platinum training facilities. At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Loc Tran staffs the counter at the campus’s esports arena, a renovated rec room where, for $4 an hour, gamers can come in to play online and console games.

In one corner, two banks of computers are reserved for the scholarship players at the university, who – like traditional college athletes – receive a subsidy to compete against other collegiate teams in League of Legends and Overwatch. (UCI’s esports are funded through arena profits and corporate sponsors, not through student tuition.) 

Mr. Tran, a senior who transferred from San Jose State University in 2016 to join UCI’s League of Legends team, sees the scholarship as invaluable to gamers who want to both compete in esports and get a degree. “It gives people a chance to pursue their education,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to go pro and still do 20 hours of school a week.” 

The first US varsity esports team was launched in 2014 at Robert Morris University Illinois, a liberal arts school in Chicago. Today dozens of universities have similar programs, and hundreds more participate in League of Legends and other collegiate gaming circuits.

UCI, however, wants to go beyond just supporting competitive gaming. Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of informatics there, believes gaming and esports research can do everything from improving student educational performance to fostering a culture of teamwork. She says that competing in high-level esports takes sophisticated communication and mastery of complex schemes. 

“The levels at which these people are performing – and not only performing but calling it play – are shocking,” Professor Steinkuehler says. “This is a serious field that has a lot of interesting questions in it, and to not ask those questions is to miss what we can learn about all sorts of forms of design, of interactivity, of human cognition.”

That view of gaming led UCI to collaborate with the Orange County Department of Education, the Samueli Foundation, and other partners to launch a local high school league in January. Like its collegiate counterparts, the Orange County High School Esports League hopes to leverage gaming’s popularity among students to engage them in campus activities. The league’s organizers also aim to use esports as a framework to teach students marketable skills in engineering, computer science, game design, and even English language arts.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Players on the La Habra (Calif.) High School esports team set up computers for practice.

Some students, not to mention faculty and parents, are skeptical. But others are eager to see authority figures finally support their passion. “I always thought gaming was a nerdy thing,” says Maddy Schremp, a junior at Laguna Hills High School in southern California who has been organizing local tournaments since she was 12. She’s hopeful that the high school league will prompt more people to see the value of esports as a business and a career.

“It’s not only creating gamers, but a community: an audience for streaming [online], stream moderators, tournament organizers, game designers,” Maddy says. “I get choked up thinking about it.”

It quickly becomes clear, after watching a few Overwatch League matches, that men dominate the conference. It’s not surprising: A lack of diversity along gender as well as racial and ethnic lines has been an enduring criticism against esports and gaming in general. Nor is the problem confined to players.

“I’ll have people come up to me and say, ‘Can I talk to the tournament organizer?’ And when I say, ‘that’s me,’ they’ll go, ‘Oh, but you’re a girl. You can’t do that,’ ” Maddy says. 

An abiding stereotype of video games as a male activity, compounded by hostile online communities, continues to stifle serious participation in gaming among women and minorities. White and Asian men make up the majority of those who work in the industry, including esports.

Ann Hermes/Staff

L.A. Valiant player Young-seo Park glares at a screen during a training scrimmage at the Blizzard Arena in Burbank, Calif.

No one is quite sure how best to address the issue. Should developers and tournament organizers start women’s leagues? Should they create more games with characters that better represent all players? What about confronting cultures, both online and off-line, that alienate and abuse minority groups? 

No gaming company has the answer. But Blizzard, for its part, developed Overwatch with gender, ethnic, and even species diversity (and marketability) in mind: The game’s 26 heroes include characters who hail from the US, Egypt, and the Himalayas; a queer pilot who can control her movements through time and space; and a genetically engineered gorilla. That Overwatch, a game in which the heroes unite to restore peace to a war-torn world, is popular with women and girls suggests the strategy is working. The Overwatch League also signed its first female player, Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon, who joined the Shanghai Dragons in February. 

Esports, however, faces other challenges. Blizzard is out to prove that it can create a game that fans will invest time and money in over the long term. If the venture falls apart, “Will the developers be willing to try again?” asks Kathy Chiang, who as a student served as president of The Association of Gamers at UCI and is now coordinator of its esports arena. “I’m still cautious.”

Questions persist about the legitimacy of esports in the eyes of the general public as well. While traditional sports have long been viewed as beneficial for young people’s bodies and minds, video games have, almost since their inception, struggled to overcome associations with laziness, antisocial tendencies, and violence. Earlier this month, President Trump met with industry representatives at the White House after voicing concern about violent video games in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. Could society really support a potential national obsession that encourages future generations to sit in front of computer screens all day?

Esports proponents say that it’s the kind of question every generation faces when­ever new technology comes to the fore. Older generations are often “aghast when they see how popular a [new] medium is with anyone younger than them,” says Steinkuehler at UCI. Gamers point out, too, that the industry has held its own for more than a decade and can continue to do so without mainstream approval. “I don’t need for The New York Times to tell me that esports is a real thing,” says Ms. Kim, the veteran interpreter. “It is.” 

But some say that continued buy-in from major corporations and other legacy groups will be crucial to esports’ sustained growth. “It’s still kind of unstable,” says Roland Li, author of “Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports.” “It’s a strong economy now, but if everything collapses, a sponsor like Coke will have to choose: Do we invest in TV ads or esports ads? That’s a risk factor.”

Still, the industry is overwhelmingly optimistic. It’s the inevitability of changing demographics, observers say. Young people who grew up on a steady diet of video games are coming of age and starting their own families. As they do, outdated attitudes around gaming – that it’s the domain of the Cheetos-eating basement-dweller, for instance – will naturally fall away. 

It’s hard to argue with that in the face of dedicated fandom. Among the attendees at a Valiant event in the Blizzard Arena parking lot on a sunny Saturday was a family of fans, including a 4-year-old sporting a yellow Valiant helmet. “She would sit on my lap and kind of watch me play,” says Justin Woychowski, father and gamer. “Eventually she asked if she could start playing, too.” 

Inside the arena, the energy is even more electric. The night the Valiant took on the Dynasty, the stands buzzed with excited fans, including a pair of graphic designers who took the afternoon off work to watch the match live. “I wanted to root for the hometown hero,” says Emil Fernandez, who wore a green-and-gold jersey. “I’ll support L.A. Valiant, win or lose.” 

When the Valiant clinched the match, they – and the rest of the crowd – roared their approval. 

“This isn’t a little niche audience of marginal characters that you can treat as anomalies,” Steinkuehler says. “This is a main form of entertainment, and it is only at the beginning.” 

Marc Duncan/AP/File

Philip Yenyo (l.), executive director of the American Indians Movement for Ohio, talks with a Cleveland Indians's fan during a protest before a baseball game against the Detroit Tigers on April 10, 2015 in Cleveland. In January, the Indians announced they were dropping the Chief Wahoo logo starting in the 2019 season.

The announcement in January that the Cleveland Indians will remove the  “Chief Wahoo” logo from use on the field has invited a reexamination of sports teams’ use of Native American-inspired names and imagery. Research presents arguments against the use of Native American sports mascots, so why does the practice persist?

Q: What was behind the decision to remove Chief Wahoo?

The Cleveland Indians will not use the “Chief Wahoo” logo – a grinning, red-faced, and feathered caricature of a Native American used since the 1940s – on the field beginning with the 2019 season.

The Major League Baseball team, however, will still sell merchandise with the logo in the Cleveland area. It would lose its trademark if it discontinued all use of the image.

The team has been phasing out Chief Wahoo since 2009, replacing the logo on most jerseys and caps with a “C” and in 2014 removing all Chief Wahoo signs inside its ballpark. Native American groups have long been vocally opposed to the caricature, saying it is racist, and have staged protests before home openers.

In the announcement about Chief Wahoo, the team and the league said the removal does not mean the franchise’s name will change.

Q: How many sports teams have names referring to Native Americans?

On the professional level, five teams have names that refer to Native Americans: in the National Football League, the Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins; in baseball, the Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians; and in the National Hockey League, the Chicago Blackhawks.

In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned Native American mascots. Eighteen schools were told to drop their mascots, but eight, after getting support from local Native American tribes, appealed the decision and retained their names and logos.

A recent search of MascotDB.com, a database of mascots in the United States, indicated that 2,286 high schools in the country still have Native American names or mascots.

Q: Why did teams start using these names and logos?

Sports logos are just one kind of reference – in a grouping that also includes the packaging for Land O’Lakes butter and the Apache helicopter – that connect to Native Americans, said Paul Chaat Smith, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, in an interview with The Atlantic. Mr. Smith’s most recent exhibit at the museum, “Americans,” explores Native American imagery.

The use of Native names and imagery in sports has its roots in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, when the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne defeated the US Army. After that battle, Native Americans “became associated with being [a] fiercely intelligent and confident fighting force,” Smith said, according to Smithsonian magazine.

Q: What are the arguments for continuing to use these names and mascots?

Some teams say their names honor Native Americans generally, or sometimes even specific individuals affiliated with the teams. For example, the Cleveland Indians say their name honors Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American – as well as the first recognized minority – to play in the National League when he was signed by the then-Cleveland Spiders in 1897.

In 1915, the team’s then-owner Charles Somers asked sportswriters from four Cleveland newspapers to come up with a new name for the team. They suggested the Indians. Before then, the team had been known as: the Infants, the Spiders, the Bronchos, the Blues, the Naps and unofficially called the Exiles, the Castoffs, the Misfits, the Molly McGuires, and other names. In news coverage the day of the announcement, there was no mention of Mr. Sockalexis. However, newspapers originally used the nickname because of the excitement surrounding Sockalexis joining the team as the league’s first Native American baseball player.

The attachment to various symbols also has to do with the fact that sports fandom, in general, provides people with a sense of belonging, distinctiveness, and meaning, says Daniel Wann, who studies the social psychology of fans at Murray State University in Kentucky.

For people whose fandom is a key part of their identity, mascots are so connected to the team that the team and mascot  “become one and the same,” says Professor Wann, which means a mascot change can be upsetting even in the cases when fans perceive the mascot to be racist.

Team logos, however, have changed for many other reasons and fans, while initially upset, “do adapt and get over it,” says Wann.

Q: And the arguments against?

Pauline Turner Strong, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says that “playing Indian” – that is, instances in which other members of society take on imagined Native characteristics – has been a phenomenon since the colonization of the US. “Belonging through reference with ‘pseudo-Indian’ symbols ... is earned at the expense of the nonbelonging of Native people themselves,” she says.

These mascots and logos associate Native Americans with animals and nature – most other sports logos refer to animals – and therefore implies Native Americans are inferior to other people, adds Professor Strong. Of the 32 NFL names, over half feature animals. For the MLB, a quarter of the 28 teams derive their names from animals.

Furthermore, these mascots present a problem because there are relatively few other images of Native Americans in mainstream media, writes Stephanie Fryberg, a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wash., in a journal article.

Professor Fryberg’s and other research shows that Native American mascots negatively affect Native youths’ self-esteem, feelings about their community’s worth, and sense of future achievement possibilities. This led the American Psychological Association to call for an end to the practice in 2004. 

SOURCE:

MascotDB, National Center for Education Statistics, FiveThirtyEight; Map includes 2,291 public and private school team names referencing Braves, Chiefs, Indians, Orangemen, Raiders, Redmen, Reds, Redskins, Savages, Squaws, Tribe, and Warriors, and tribe names: Apaches, Arapahoe, Aztecs, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Chinooks, Chippewas, Choctaws, Comanches, Eskimos, Mohawks, Mohicans, Seminoles, Sioux, and Utes

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RESEARCH: Rebecca Asoulin/Staff, GRAPHIC: Jacob Turcotte, Rebecca Asoulin/Staff

Q: What else is happening along these lines?

In 2014, the US Patent and Trademark Office canceled six trademarks for the Washington Redskins, saying the name cannot be trademarked because federal law does not protect trademarks with offensive and disparaging language. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in another case in June that the federal government’s ban on offensive trademark registrations violated the First Amendment, effectively ending the legal controversy over the team’s name.

It remains to be seen how each team will respond to the continuing debate. In Cleveland, for instance, the removal of Chief Wahoo comes ahead of the team hosting the All-Star Game in 2019. However, Redskins owner Dan Snyder has said, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER – you can use caps.”

At the high school level, however, the number of teams using the Redskins name has almost halved from 93 in 1990 to 49 in 2017.

Editor's note: This file has been updated to include additional information and a graphic to illustrate the number of high school sports teams that use Native American imagery.

Reuters

Figurines are seen in front of the Facebook logo in this illustration taken March 20, 2018.

Facebook, the social media giant that collects data on about a quarter of humanity, is in the hot seat over the disclosure of personal information about 50 million of its users to a voter-profiling company. With both Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) now probing this latest Facebook security lapse, we can expect the next chapter is about to be written on privacy protections for the ongoing revolution known as “big data.”

Every country, not just the United States, is trying to find a nuanced balance between secrecy and the transparency of personal data, such as facial recognition of shoppers. Facebook is not alone. Government lapses in privacy are common, too. Facebook just happens to be the biggest provider of data, much to its profit.

Society gains by allowing open data if the purpose is to stop or catch terrorists, swindlers, and pedophiles. Just as important is the “right to be left alone.” With each breach of data, new rules must be written.

The current rules are still not clear enough when it comes to data culled in targeting voters for a political campaign. Anyone who has answered personal questions on a local census for his or her city or town knows such information can be used, or misused, by politicians.

We also willingly hand over data to companies and rely on their commitments to privacy. It appears Facebook was not careful enough in how its data was used for the 2016 presidential campaign.

The mass surveillance of “social data” is only going to increase. What must rise with it is a recognition that privacy is essential for individuals to achieve their unique expression, or their identity.

“Without privacy, concepts such as identity, dignity, autonomy, independence, imagination, and creativity are more difficult to realize and maintain,” writes David Anderson, Britain’s former reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation.

Privacy allows the very trust that companies and government rely on to fulfill their purposes. If a privacy breach erodes trust, the data can begin to dry up.

The task in such cases is to find a trustworthy arbiter that can balance privacy and other interests, such as security and business. Will Facebook be able to now rebuild that trust? Or will its future depend on new rules from the FTC and Congress? Finding the best privacy protections is an ongoing struggle, one that must ensure trust remains a key quality for digital users.