The UP Hobby Gamers' Circle

Since the group's inception, HGC has been an official student organization of the University of the Philippines. Like all other groups in the academic community, we continue to uphold the excellence in education that UP stands for.

Hobbygames are encouraged; as they enhance the mind with the nuances in their gameplay. Players are kept sharp and alert, and the strategies that they must employ encourage creative and tactical thinking.

Games are an important aspect of our lives, but we condone gaming at the expense of academics. As such, we reject applications from students that perform poorly on the semester that they apply.

At the start of every semester, HGC opens its doors to any and all hobbygamers in UP Diliman. Application is open to all Diliman students of good scholastic standing. Our application is not rigorous; an applicant's skill at playing hobbygames is only secondary to knowing and befriending the other members.

If you are interested, do approach as at the AS Hill. The application takes one semester, and should you be accepted, you will be a probationary member the following sem.

After that, congratulations! You are now a full-pledged member of UP HGC!

...is what this student organization is all about. After all, our whole group is founded on the basis of playing games; and games keep the soul young.

When the Hobbygamers' Circle was founded, we felt a need to define what a hobbygame is. We are able to determine the scope of the organization in this way, generating events both on and off campus that focuses on these games.

So what is our working definition of a hobbygame?

"Hobbygame - a non-traditional game played by at least two players."

We acknowledge the fun and importance of traditional games, but at the same time, our group focuses on newer games that have not yet established themselves in mainstream media.

In addition, we cover games that have been misinterpreted by popular culture. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, have garnered an unfounded reputation as an evil game. By playing and showcasing these games in the public, we hope to increase awareness about them. These games are fun, they develop positive social skills, and they encourage extensive reading.

Next, note that we have included the condition, "played by at least two players". This is yet another aspect of our mission to spread camaraderie. We encourage games that involve heavy interaction with other people. The more people are involved in a game, the better the level of the resulting social interaction will be. This way, a student will develop better social skills that will help that person succeed in life outside the University.

The Philippine online community has recently been on the move against what has been dubbed as The Great Book Blockade of the Philippines.

We the members of the UP Hobby Gamers' Circle, believe in literacy and the free flow of information, and would like to voice our support for the movement against the "Great Book Blockade of 2009". We believe that books of every kind are essential for the education of the Filipino people and the furthering of exchange and understanding between all cultures.

As an issue that heavily tackles political matters, we will not expound on the matter here. Instead, UP HGC constructed a new Squidoo lens; On the Book Blockade. The aim of the lens is to increase awareness on the issue, and to dispel certain false assumptions.

The Knights of Spam are an order of elite hobbygamers dedicated to the destruction of Spam's evil brother, the six-armed Lord of Evil known as Internet Spam. Blessed with the Radiant power of Good Spam, we aim to defeat this evil and all its minions.

This is not an easy task, and some of us will perish along the way. But it is a sacrifice we must accept for the betterment of humanity.

We mortals have done what was thought to be impossible:

We killed the gods.

Our ancestors slew the gods to free themselves from divine tyranny. We freed ourselves from the gods, and we've been paying the price for our freedom ever since. The land has been cracked and broken, scoured by the elemental fires of the Daystar's madness. Unnatural beasts and mishappen flora creep across the face of creation.

But all that may change with the discovery of the Godstones. Relics of the ancients, bones of fallen deities, crystallized quintessence, the Godstones hold the power of the fallen gods within them.

Will the Godstones be used to heal a fractured Creation? Are they really the key to divine ascension? Or are they harbingers of a dark fate and the return of the god-kings of old? Whatever the future holds, we mortals will endure. We've killed gods before. We can kill them again.

One of our current projects, the Bonethrall Campaign Setting is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world created for the 4th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game. To be signed in under Wizards of the Coast's Game System License, this project showcases the product of HGC's collective imaginations.

The Bonethrall Campaign Setting is a work in progress, brought to you by the Cosmology Overhaul Project Associated Leaders (COPAL) of the UP Hobby Gamers' Circle. It's own lens is coming soon!

Sketch provided by Razekiel. Check out Razekiel's Deviantart (ADULT content) for more of his work!