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Picture this: you're at a conference dinner, and suddenly the entire room goes silent. Not because something went wrong, but because the room full of community members just opened their custom trading card decks and discovered themselves transformed into superheroes. That's exactly what happened at the Knowledge 2025 MVP dinner when we unveiled the CreatorCon Collectible Community Card app. Or as we lovingly call it, C3.
What started as inspiration from a hackathon idea and a creative community member's vision became one of the most talked-about experiences at Knowledge 2025. But this story isn't really about an app, it's about what happens when you give a community a reason to connect, compete, and have fun together.
The Spark of an Idea
Every great project starts with inspiration, and C3 had not one, but two sources. Last year at Knowledge 2024, Kevin Clark created a truly special superhero card game called SN-App that got people excited, me especially because I love my Toulsons card. Around the same time, the hackathon winning team had pitched a Pokemon Go meets World of Warcraft style app that would let people compete in teams by scanning different locations around the conference.
Both ideas were brilliant on their own, but we saw something magical in combining them. What if we could take the personal connection of trading cards and merge it with the competitive team element of location-based gaming? What if we could give everyone at Knowledge their own superhero avatar and turn networking into an adventure?
Building the Dream Team
In February 2025, we assembled our technical team: Earl Duque, Kristy Merriam, David Murch, Hannah Bassana, and myself. We had just three months to turn this ambitious vision into reality for Knowledge 2025, and honestly, we weren't even sure we'd pull it off.
The beauty of this team was how naturally we divided the work based on our strengths. David and Hannah, partnered with us from ServiceNow's mobile team to build the scanning app where all the magic happened: collecting cards, viewing team scores, and seeing your growing collection. Kristy worked closely with them on the mobile app, bridged the mobile app to our core data model by handling everything QR Code related, and helped us get a production instance with all the nodes. All. Of. The. Nodes.
Earl became our gamification guru, building the scoring system and creating those adorable achievement cards with their little robot mascots that everyone fell in love with. He also handled the display boards scattered around the conference where teams could compete for control and get their cards featured.
My focus was on the intake experience that included taking your photo, working with the AI to create your superhero avatar, and orchestrating all the moving pieces to generate your final card. And the achievement rules engine that determined when someone unlocked those coveted special achievements.
The Magic Behind the Avatars
Here's where things got really fun. We used Replicate AI to transform ordinary conference photos into superhero avatars then used another AI model to remove the background from the image to make the avatar pop. But we didn't stop there, we also leveraged NowAssist to generate superhero titles and character descriptions based on the technical superpowers people described about themselves.
The AI dubbed me "Chaos Advocate" which I embrace whole heartedly. Everyone got to generate up to 12 different avatar options to choose from, ensuring they found one that really represented their superhero self.
We also implemented a manual review process to keep things professional while maintaining that sense of fun and creativity. For the pre-event cards, we had time to really nail the quality. For the on-site printing, we kept things moving fast with photo paper and plastic sleeves – not quite as premium, but the excitement was just as real.
The Pre-Game Strategy
About 1,200 people created their avatars before Knowledge even started. We sent these off to be professionally printed on card stock, and our MVPs received extra special gold foil cards along with decks containing their own cards plus cards from other community members.
That MVP dinner moment I mentioned earlier? Pure magic. When we announced that everyone should open their card decks, the entire room stopped. You could hear the rustle of packaging, then gasps of delight, then immediate conversations as people started comparing and trading their cards. It was one of those moments where you realize you've created something that truly resonates with people.
Game On: Knowledge 2025
By the end of the conference, we had around 4,705 people with cards and over 44,000 digital scans. The C3 booth was constantly covered in cards and we were blown away by how much people loved these cards. People weren't just casually participating; they were fully engaged.
Players were automatically assigned to one of three teams named after ServiceNow's brand colors: Wasabi Wanderers (Wasabi Green), Indigo Keepers (Purple), and Infinite Dreamers (Infinite Blue). Fun fact: I unofficially rebranded my team to the Indigo Wendigos. It did not catch on.
The teams battled it out throughout the conference earning points by scanning cards, earning achievements, and capturing points of interest. Team Wasabi Green ultimately took the crown, which was announced during the CreatorCon keynote. As a proud Team Indigo member, I was definitely disappointed, but watching the community rally around their teams was incredible.
What really struck us was how the cards served as the perfect icebreaker. People would see a cool avatar and approach someone they'd never met just to talk about their card. We heard story after story of connections being made, conversations being started, and networking happening in the most natural way possible.
Beyond the Game
The social media response was phenomenal. People weren't just sharing conference updates, they were sharing their superhero avatars. Cards showed up in the first few photos of so many Knowledge recaps. We even had someone offer $20 to buy a particularly rare card from one of our team members' friends.
We integrated C3 throughout the entire conference experience. The display boards showed team scores and featured cards from people who'd scanned that location. We had location-based scanning that tied into the zone control competition. Cards were featured in the CreatorCon keynote on massive banners. It wasn't just an app – it became part of the fabric of Knowledge 2025.
The Technical Reality
I'd be lying if I said it was easy. Working with images in ServiceNow presented unique challenges, from Base64 encoding everything to dealing with awkward storage and retrieval compared to traditional file systems. The asynchronous nature of the AI processing with webhooks and HMAC validations created timing challenges that required some creative problem-solving. Then there were challenges of scale like managing offline capabilities to handle conference WiFi, supporting a wide variety of devices and hardware, and ensuring the app's performance could keep up.
But here's the thing about great teams – when everyone's focused on the same goal, you figure it out. We learned, we adapted, and we delivered something that exceeded even our own expectations.
Looking Forward
ServiceNow leadership has been incredibly supportive, and we're already preparing C3 for the World Forums throughout the rest of 2025. The next iteration will focus on operational improvements – better error handling, streamlined user experience, and smoother processes based on everything we learned at Knowledge.
We're also planning deeper technical articles for those who want to understand the nuts and bolts of how we built this. But this story isn't really about the code or the infrastructure – it's about what happens when you give a community something fun to rally around.
The Real Victory
Looking back, what I'm most proud of isn't the technical achievement (though I'm pretty proud of that too). It's the community engagement. We set out to help people connect, and we watched it happen in real time. We saw strangers become friends over trading cards. We saw teams form and compete with genuine enthusiasm. We saw people share their superhero selves with pride.
C3 started as two ideas that we thought would work well together and it became a showcase feature at one of ServiceNow's biggest events. But most importantly, it became a way for our community to see themselves as the superheroes they already were. Just with better avatars and trading cards to prove it.
When someone offered $20 for a single card, when the MVP dinner room went silent with excitement, when the booth was covered in printed cards, when 44,000 scans happened over just a few days... those weren't just metrics. They were proof that sometimes the best technology is the kind that gets out of the way and lets people be people.
And that's a pretty super power in itself.
The C3 team continues to evolve the platform for future ServiceNow events. Stay tuned for more technical deep-dives into how we built the system, overcame the challenges, and what's coming next for the CreatorCon Collectible Community Card experience.
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