Rather than showing the real future city, it is a metaphor to satirize the present era. Although living a rich life, anxiety and dystopian visions for the future have fused. And the neon sign always blinks. Now I hope they get a bit out of Blade Runner. Hello, Watson In this session, we're going to talk about Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. Many of you who subscribe to "Sherlock Hyunjoon" asked me to talk about the city and space in the game. And the one that was mentioned the most was this Night City. There's a hit movie called <Cyber Funk Edge Runner> that was popular a few years ago, also my eldest son recommended a cartoon movie so strongly that it left me a lot of lingering feelings. (From the architect's point of view) If you look at this Night City, It is composed of a virtual city somewhere between LA and San Francisco on the west coast of the United States. And they actually formed this city with the help of city experts. It's set up as a free city that doesn't belong to either the U.S. central government or the United States of Independent States. The management is balanced by the forces of super giants Arasaka and Millie Tech. Yes, both companies have the military industry base. The area is 75 square kilometers. The total area of Gangnam-gu and Seocho-gu is about 86 square kilometers, so it's not that big. It has a population of about 7 million. It means that most of the population in Seoul lives in Gangnam and Seocho. So it's really dense. The current population of Gangnam-gu and Seocho-gu is about 950,000, so about six times denser. You can look at it like this. There are more than 7,000 homicides in 2076. Seoul City has 104 homicides in 2022. There's a lot. I'm really flabbergasted. There are more than I thought! So, the number of murders in Seoul in 2022, How many times is this from 104 cases? 70 times? That's the kind of setting of this. In a word, it's a dystopia. If it's 6 or 7 times denser than this, it means there's no sunlight. And the threat of murder is 70 times higher. You don't know when you're going to die while walking. Of course, the size of Seoul is much larger than this, so it's more than 70 times. I don't even think we can call it a city. So it's like this. Cyberpunk is a combination of cybernetics and funk. Cybernetics means "mechanical”. Punk means a bit of a dark world. I think cyberpunk can be seen as talking about the mechanized world. I think it was around 1992 when I first heard the word cyberpunk. At that time, the cartoon <Akira> came out. And we talked about future Tokyo, Neo Tokyo. Scenes after the nuclear war, the one with super powers comes out, and many cool electronic devices. And it's actually a lot ahead of that, like <Neuromancer> I don't know if you saw the movie called <Code Name J>. It's a movie that Keanu Reeves, the best-selling actor in this industry, starred in as a young man. But the overall atmosphere is that humans and machines are becoming more and more fused - the birth of a hybrid new generation. Plus a future background and more dystopian things. There are always super-large companies that have power that's higher than the state. And individuals aren't protected. These are the main backgrounds. Yes, these things are more prevalent. As Japan went through a bubble economy after the war, the generations that were hit by it are living a prosperous life. However when it comes to the future, things that had visions that were similar to anxiety matched, and this converged. That's what is said. So this is the game. If you look at the city in Cyberpunk 2077, it's a form of city that has its own history. Because if you look to the right, it's all desert. So in this area, it might have been hard to protect water and trees. So everything is arranged by the sea. You can think of it as an Incheon port. It's called "pier" because the area that comes into contact with the sea is increasing as we make artificial docks. Along with that and the number of encounters with the sea increases, this city is formed. You can call those parts artificial earth. That's how the city is built. There's a central zone in the middle. This is in the center of the city, and it's called the corporate square, where the main buildings like Arasaka are located. Even if you go to a city, like Sony centers that are built in Berlin, those buildings are formed by building a court yard. It's like Garden Five in Korea. That's how those things are made. The interesting thing here is, if you look here, there's a round building like a sports complex. If it's a city, those facilities are usually like Jamsil Main Stadium. Back then, Jamsil was almost empty during the Olympics. There's always a stadium on the outskirts of the city. We need to be able to secure such a large land and build sports facilities, so we build such a main stadium at the outermost part of the city. When I see that, I think it's pretty much right. It's called Little China. That's right. No matter what city you go to, there's always a Chinatown. It's in San Francisco and New York. There's one in Boston, too. I guess so. When a city was built, the Chinese people, who made up the largest part of Asia, were the ones who were paid very low wages. In New York, a lot of Chinese people went to work in Lincoln Tunnel. Like San Francisco, a lot of Chinese workers went to make Golden Gate Bridge. Because workers' wages are cheap, these people can't live in a typical city. Then, of course, they gather together to make their own ghetto and create an ecosystem. In fact, people who plan the city say that the creation of a Chinatown in the city has a lot of negative effects. It's considered an area where the underground economy is so economically active that money doesn't come out when it goes in. In terms of location, this Chinatown is not far from the center. Because usually those inner-city slums like Chinatown aren't built far away. Being far away means that these people have to commute by car or subway, but it costs a lot of money. So if you look at it, this slum is located very close to the city center. So like Manhattan, Harlem isn't far away. China Town is not far south, so it has that kind of distance. But things like this were built a long time ago, so they settled down before the city expanded. Oh, my. There's a Watson area. Are we living here together now? Haha And there's the Arasaka waterfront. But if I say it's this dystopian, though I don't know how advanced foreign trade is, the fact that there's a pier like that in the middle and that there are huge factory buildings like the Arasaka waterfront by the sea, that means there's a lot of trading ships coming back and forth, but as far as I know, this society is not that kind. I think it's a bit wrong because maritime trade is not developing in this era. Heywood, I think this is a rich neighborhood. Oh is it a city occupied by gangs? The rich town is Westbrook. That's right. It's only green here. Nature is only here. If you look at it, there's a thing like Colorado desert on the right. If you look at the green golf course here, green area is made by spraying a lot of water, and this is the only rich neighborhood. And next to that, there's Japan Town. Japan Town is in a good neighborhood. Let's take a look at the actual games. It’s from first person perspective. It's so big. Why is this house so big? It's almost 80 square meter. The window is ultra-sized without a frame. Blade Runner is the original of things like this. I heard that the light effect is unique in <Blade Runner>. How is that unique - a lot of moving lights are used. Usually, when you watch a movie at a theater, a lot of parts are divided into day and night. It's natural light during the day, so it's fixed light, and when it's night, the light sources move. Car headlights and things like that. But I don't think there was much of a daytime scene for <Blade Runner>. There are only artificial lights indoors at night. When you look at it, it feels like a place without nature. That's really depressing. It's different from our daily lives. The only nature you can feel there is rain. Actually it doesn't make sense when it rains. It doesn't rain that much in California. So it shows how abnormal the weather is. This is a building with 2,000 households here. Two thousand households are going into that building? The largest apartment complex in Korea is ‘Helio City’. That has 10,000 households. 10,000 households. The apartment complex in Apgujeong-dong that we know the most has about 4,900 households. If you say 2000 households, it's typically an apartment complex. But it's all in here. At first glance, if you want to put the 2000 households there, you have to go in smaller than Gosiwon. But the general apartment you saw earlier was about 80 square meters, so there's a bit of a gap there. It's like living in a penthouse in the case of that person earlier. And I don't think the 2000 households can live in that wide hallway. It's so wide. I think if you make a game when you reduce the size according to the actual situation, you can't promote. There needs to be a gap of seconds after watching this scene. In reality, if you place the store at this interval, it's almost ruined. Or the rent is very expensive. They say it's an area where low- and middle-class races are mixed. I don't think so. I don't think high-income people would come here. Will these people come to this area where the threat of murder is dozens of times higher than Seoul? Because they won't die even if they're shot? Because high income people are cyberpunk? (There are some places with good security) Aha If you look at it, the one that sticks out like a cantilever on the right side - there's a building like that that was built in Italy about sixty or seventy years ago. You can see that in Milan. Although it's made of concrete. From what I can see, in this landscape, when we were talking about cities, we said Gangnam-gu and Seocho-gu had 7 million people. I think it would make sense if they had NPCs 100 times more than this. I think it's such an empty city. It's almost as dense as LA. But it's amazing that these games can be rendered in real time. It's really nice here. I guess this is Chinatown. It's sunny here. One of the most effective things to do when you show this dystopia is to get the train up. If you let the train go up, we feel scared when we see something fast. The other one is that, we feel scared when something goes up there. So when drone taxis are flying back and forth in the sky, it's going to make people feel more psychologically threatened. That's what Professor Kim Kyungil said. Humans feel scared when they see birds or things that can attack them from above. But the fact that the huge trains are going above me - it's not pleasant for people walking on the sidewalk. There's always a cart bar. Their imaginations are so frozen in "Blade Runner" Neon signs. This is future in the 80s. Isn't this too old? And the neon sign always blinks. Some of them are always broken. It's stale! The red light that comes out every day. Right? They lack imagination. It's not new, right? There must be something better. I was going to say something if I saw newspapers rolling around on the floor, but fortunately, there's no newspaper. In this era, people won't even print a newspaper and read it. The city is really depressing. I told you this last time when we talked about the back room. I told you that it's people who complete the space. If there's no one around, you can feel scared. I think this empty city is one of them. Games can't contain too many NPCs. I think the whole city looks desolate like a back room. Ah, this is the company's office building that is the greatest with Arasaka. It's just like Tokyo in the 1990s? (Sherlock Hyunjoon's reasoning on Cyberpunk) I don't know why, but the most distinctive part is, "Why do humans keep dreaming of converging with machines?" Actually, it's the limit that we're born to live as organisms. We’ll die one day. Things like the finiteness of my life are pretty much the default values that we can't change. I think the only way we can change it independently is to integrate it with machines. So, things like using smartphones a lot... In a way, you're expanding your memories and your records into a virtual space, right? I think it's also a fusion with machines. So the extreme of that dream is like things from <Cyber Funk Edge Runner>. Trying to fuse mechanical and organic ecosystems as they keep changing parts of their bodies. And trying to think that they can control their bodies, too. I think it's based on the assumption that it's the future of humanity. But what's interesting is that they always end with a dystopia. I don't think I've ever seen a movie with a happy ending through convergence with a machine like that. Compared to Night City, I think Blade Runner is more realistic. If the population density is that high, it should be this high - about the size of the building and the scale of the building. And the fact that there's no sunlight at the bottom... Since the Night City is a game, it looked kind of empty. In order for 7 million people to live in a city the size of Gangnam-gu and Seocho-gu, there must be the size and density of the building needed. I don't think it fits well with that The Night City looks like Ilsan. <Ghost in the Shell> is also an art. What year was this released? In 1995. <Ghost in the Shell> and <Blade Runner> have something in common - It's all given that this future city is dense. Then, we need a city that we can use as a role model and benchmark. I think Hong Kong is the most representative. So, I think this <Ghost in the Shell> is what shows that well. There are a lot of signboards in Chinese characters, or the plane goes down very low in the city. You can see the view through the buildings. It's just what we can see in Hong Kong. Old buildings and new signboards are overlapping. I think these things were depicted much more realistically. This <Ghost in the Shell> is a society where amazing robots are made, but there are absurd robots. But don't you think about using that robot to clean? That's a bit of a mystery. If we use robots to improve the city, we can make it better. Would a signage on the road still like that when they make those kinds of robots? I can feel the gaps. That's the same with Blade Runner. If it's that much, they can make it a lot better than this, right? That's what I think. So SF is rather than showing the real future city, it's said that it’s a metaphor or a fairy tale to satirize the present era. So if I go too far into the future, the gap is too big, so I think they left those as traces. What I don't like is, we shoot here anyway, right? But the space is too big. What I'm talking about is when I'm like this, the fact that everything is spread out like this means that - it's too easy to prepare in advance when the enemy appears. That's why I think there's a big gap with the actual reality with the degree of space. They should have made it ten times more complicated and dense than this. If you look at the trials that I tested with the Unreal Engine, there are reproduced areas around Cheonggyecheon? If you look at it, it's almost the same. I think that would have been possible. And what I want for the game makers is to get out of the <Blade Runner>. How long are you going to bleed it off? I don't think they’ve ever gotten out of <Lord of the Rings> and <Blade Runner>. Fantasy is always the Lord of the Rings and SF is always the Blade Runner. What year was that? I hope we can get away from that. But that doesn't mean I'm good at it. But there are more professionals than me. I think it might be because the decision makers above don't allow it. Isn't it because if you bring something that's not Lord of the Rings or Blade Runner, the executive doesn't like it? Yes, we talked about Cyberpunk 2077 Night City today. I'll see you next time.
