History of the United Federation of Gaming
The United Federation of Gaming is, and always has been, headed by Kirk. As I am the person writing this page, I'm going to stop referring to myself in third person right now. I'm going to spend a lot of time on this, so you can understand my perspective on gaming, and on what a clan should be... so you can understand me better, and the values of UFG better. I haven't even really described our full history in this much detail to most of our members...

Before The Clan
First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I started playing Halo with my neighbors, who actually played it before I did, but were pretty new to it when they introduced me to the game. Back in Summer of 2004, when I was around 12 years old. I'd go over to their house with my HP Pavilion ze4315 and we'd connect our ethernet cables to their router. We didn't try play online at my house, because I had 56k. They couldn't play online at all because they had DirecWay Satellite Internet, so they had awful lag.
We sat in their kitchen for hours a few days each week, playing Halo. I think we mostly played Blood Gulch. It was awesome, and for some reason, the maps seemed so much bigger back then. Jake (you guys know him as Rekcut) always stole the vehicles from the base Danielle and I played at, and made us walk. lol.

'The AT Clan'
In December of 2005, some local people told me about the possibility of getting a wireless Internet service from AT Cyber Systems, a small ISP in Genoa, Illinois. I called them immediately and scheduled a site survey. My neighbors and I were so excited, I was ecstatic, and they were happy for me. (Plus they couldn't wait to convince their parents to get the broadband after they saw how great it was at my house).
AT Cyber didn't want to come out... we were 15 miles from the tower (the maximum distance for Motorola Canopy wireless) and there was snow on the roof. They put off the survey until the first or second week of January 2006, I don't exactly remember. They found out that I could get service, and scheduled the installation for late January. In excitement and anticipation, I started working on a website for a gaming clan my neighbors and I called the "AT" Clan, after AT Cyber Systems.
On January 27th, 2006, the service was installed. (In 2008, I started the tradition of 'Broadband Day' tournaments on this date). It was a 256kbps base speed with a 20MB cap of a burst at 2Mbps... complicated terms, yeah. But later, due to my house becoming an access point for a neighbor, I would get much faster speeds. So it wasn't too fast in the beginning, but I didn't care. I was the proud user of an always-on broadband connection that I could play Halo on flawlessly!
The AT Clan never really recruited... we were just a small webpage (atclan.co.nr) hosted on my home server. The only people that ever visited the website was myself and my neighbors. But we proudly carried ~AT~ in front of our names... all four of us. It was a blast nonetheless, especially when my neighbors got broadband too.

The United Federation of Gaming
On January 27th, 2007, exactly one year after the installation of my AT Cyber Internet, my friend Simon (who still pays for our domain, and my hosting) bought the domain "United Federation of Gaming.com" for me. I think at the time I was really into Star Trek The Next Generation. I wanted a cooler clan, I even played around with calling it "Borg" but after finding the www.unitedfederationofgaming.com domain available, I went with that name.
Shortly thereafter, I experimented with ways to make my site look like a Star Trek themed page, and we came up with the LCARS design that we still use today, in 2009. It's been heavily modified since the beginning though. LCARS is a term from Star Trek meaning "Library Computer Access and Retriveal System". Basically, LCARS is the operating system\GUI for all the input terminals on the bridge of Enterprise.
UFG has been through quite a few ups and downs in its history. It seems like gaming is a difficult interest to sustain in people... so UFG goes through several month spurts of activity, followed by several month spurts of inactivity. It's a problem I've been trying to fix, and a problem I have myself caused a few times in recent history.
In June of 2009, during my spare time between my summer job and working in the tech department at my high school, I have redesigned the UFG website, and made a lot of useful database-driven applications work for us. Hopefully this design and engine will be easy to update and modify in the future, and will encourage a constant level of user activity. But ultimately, we need you guys.

What's The Point of UFG?
As the admiral of UFG, I want to help create a community of online friends who get together and play games. In my experience, it's always more fun to play Halo with friends and neighbors, even if it's over the Internet, just because you know them - and you can yell at them later when they teamkill you, and talk to them about how awesome they're doing.
OK so that sounded stupid. My point is, gaming is more fun with familiar faces. I don't ever want a member of UFG to become a nameless person that nobody remembers or talks to. I encourage UFG members to add each other on instant messenger, and play games together outside of UFG's Halo\Enemy Territory selection, and play games that aren't UFG scheudled tournaments.
I also schedule tournaments, to promote a competitive atmosphere. I mean, there's no point in playing if the only reward is the game, right? People are naturally competitive, so let's run with it and have some fun!
Will UFG ever have 600 members? Not likely. That sort of defeats the purpose of a small circle of friends. I'd like to see UFG get up to the 30s or 40s so we have enough members to sustain our community while some lose interest from time to time. So far we've never made it to 20, but we got damn close on the last run... but by the end we were back to our core 5 or 6. And that's what UFG is all about. We're a core community. Our die-hard members have been with us as long as they can be, and haven't disappeared off the face of the web after a month. If that's your plan, don't even bother to join... it's a waste of our time and yours. But if you want to fit in somewhere that you can kick back and have some fun, then UFG is for you!
Yay for ten mile long pages... but I hope you get my point, and that you now have a better understanding of UFG, and why I founded it, and where I'm heading with it in the future. :) All that said... happy gaming!