Hours, Fidelity and Format in Attachment to Performers: An Audience Panel Study of 812 Simstim Viewers, 2042

1. Introduction

Simstim is the Sprawl's sensory broadcast. A recorded performer's perceptions, movements and bodily sensations are captured and played back to an audience member, who experiences them as the performer did. The leading studios, Sense/Net among them, have built a star system on the premise that this intimacy binds audiences to performers more closely than any flat recording could (Arceneaux, 2038). Subscription models, licensing terms and the pricing of long-running performers all rest on the premise (Karataş, 2039; Castellanos, 2041).

The premise is rarely tested. Studio-commissioned audience research is commonly reported to show high attachment to simstim performers (Castellanos, 2041), and comparative reviews have set sensory and flat media side by side (Oğuzhan, 2037), but the relevant comparison is the same audience's attachment to performers it follows in an ordinary flat recording. Without a within-audience comparison, a high score tells us about the audience, not about the format. Studio data have a second weakness: they confound the format with its dose. A subscriber who watches a performer for forty hours in a season is not the same as one who watches for four, and attachment may grow with exposure whether or not the format matters.

Recording fidelity adds a third complication. Sense/Net distinguishes reduced, standard and full capture of the performer's sensorium (Brandvold, 2039). Fuller capture costs more to produce and to play back. If attachment rises steadily with fidelity, full capture is worth its price. If it levels off at a standard tier, the extra expense buys little in audience terms.

We test three specific expectations in a panel design in which each member rated both formats. First, attachment to a performer rises with hours of exposure with diminishing returns. Second, simstim is associated with a higher level of attachment and a steeper rise with hours than flat recording. Third, fidelity is associated with attachment. We write in 2043 and report a panel surveyed in 2042.

2. Methods

Panel. The Sense/Net audience panel is a standing sample of subscribers recruited with quotas for age and district, and it has been described elsewhere (Whitlow-Park, 2040). In 2042 we invited 1,002 active panel members, and 812 completed the survey (81%). Members were aged 18 to 74 (mean 36.2, SD 10.8). Each was asked to name a simstim performer they followed regularly, whose recordings they had played in the preceding 90 days, and a flat-recorded performer in the same genre. Performers were anonymised before analysis, and no performer's name appears in this paper.

Measures. Attachment was measured with the ten-item Performer Attachment Scale, in which each item is rated from 1 to 7 and the sum ranges from 10 to 70 (Sense/Net Research Institute, 2041). Higher scores indicate stronger attachment. Exposure was the member's reported hours of the named performer's output in the preceding 90 days. Because members named performers they followed regularly, every participant reported some exposure to each, with a minimum of 0.8 hours, and viewers with none are outside the sample. For simstim performers we checked the report against subscription playback logs, and for the flat-recorded performers we relied on the report alone. Genre was the panel's four-category classification: drama (258 participants), adventure (222), music (177) and daily-life recordings (155), the last being sessions in which the performer records an ordinary day. Fidelity was the tier recorded in the simstim recording's metadata: reduced (202 participants), standard (363) or full (247). Flat recordings have no fidelity tier.

Analysis. Attachment is a continuous score, and each participant contributed two ratings, so the 1,624 ratings are not independent. We fitted a linear regression to all ratings with standard errors clustered on the participant, and report intervals from the t distribution with 811 degrees of freedom (Marwick and Dube, 2040). The predictors were format (simstim against flat), base-2 logarithm of hours centred at 14 hours, the format-by-hours interaction, dummy variables for standard and full fidelity (active only for simstim ratings), genre and age per ten years. A logarithmic hours term expresses the expectation of diminishing returns. We compared it with a linear hours term by variance explained, and added a squared term in log hours to ask whether the log form still left curvature. Because genre was the same for a participant's two ratings, it is balanced within person and the format contrast does not depend on it. The correlation between a participant's two residuals estimates the stability of attachment across formats. All tests are two-sided and intervals are 95%.

3. Results

Simstim performers received higher attachment scores than flat-recorded performers: 53.8 (SD 8.6) against 42.5 (SD 7.6). Median reported exposure was 13.4 hours for simstim performers (IQR 7.6–23.4) and 14.9 hours for flat-recorded performers (IQR 8.2–27.9). Attachment increased with exposure in both formats (Table 1).

In the regression, the simstim performer at the reference exposure of 14 hours and reduced fidelity scored 9.70 points higher than the flat-recorded performer (95% CI 8.79 to 10.61; p < .001). Each doubling of hours was associated with a 2.05-point increase for flat-recorded performers (95% CI 1.65 to 2.45) and a 3.45-point increase for simstim performers (95% CI 3.09 to 3.81). The interaction, 1.40 points (95% CI 0.86 to 1.93; p < .001), is the difference between these two slopes. The logarithmic form fitted slightly better than the linear form (R² 0.492 against 0.453). A squared term in log hours had a coefficient of 0.07 (−0.07 to 0.20; p = .328), so we do not claim curvature beyond the logarithmic form. Averaged over the panel, simstim ratings exceeded flat ratings by 11.33 points (95% CI 10.71 to 11.95); the model figure above is the gap at the reference exposure and the lowest fidelity tier, and the flat recordings have no tier, so the two figures answer different questions. 2.2% of ratings sat at the scale maximum and 0.0% at the minimum. Overall, the model explained 49% of the variance in attachment, and the correlation between a participant's two residuals was 0.48, so part of the variation lies in the person rather than in the performer or format.

Among simstim ratings, standard fidelity was associated with 2.74 more points than reduced fidelity (95% CI 1.55 to 3.93; p < .001) and full fidelity with 2.67 more (95% CI 1.35 to 3.99; p < .001). The difference between full and standard fidelity was −0.07 points (95% CI −1.25 to 1.11; p = .903), so the data show no step up beyond standard. The interval is not narrow enough to exclude a difference of about one point in either direction.

Genre was associated with attachment (joint Wald test χ²(3) = 36.1, p < .001). Compared with drama, daily-life recordings differed by −2.25 points (95% CI −3.43 to −1.07) and music by 1.35 points (95% CI 0.16 to 2.53); adventure did not differ detectably (0.78, 95% CI −0.32 to 1.89). Age was associated with slightly lower attachment: −0.58 points per ten years (95% CI −0.96 to −0.20).

4. Discussion

The three expectations received different answers. Attachment rose with the logarithm of hours in both formats, which describes diminishing returns in raw hours: early hours are associated with larger gains than later ones. We did not test the log form against other curved forms beyond the squared term. The simstim format carried both a higher level and a steeper slope, so the gap between formats was wider among those with more hours. The fidelity result is less welcome to the studios. Standard capture was associated with higher attachment than reduced capture, but we found no detectable difference between full and standard capture.

Taken together, the format and slope findings fit what the star-system premise predicts. They do not demonstrate that the format is responsible. The simstim and flat-recorded performers differ in more than their medium: they have different careers, publicity and audiences, and each participant chose both. The within-person design removes stable differences between viewers from the format contrast, which is why we used it. It does not remove them from the slopes, which are pooled estimates across viewers, and it cannot remove differences between performers.

The slope finding needs particular care. Exposure was measured as hours of viewing, and hours are partly the consequence of attachment. A viewer who is attached to a performer watches more. The steeper simstim slope might therefore reflect a stronger pull toward further viewing, a stronger effect of viewing, or both, and our data cannot separate them. We read the interaction as showing that attachment scores rise more steeply with hours for simstim performers, which is a narrower claim than the one the studios make.

Fidelity's plateau is the finding most likely to bear on decisions, and also the one with the widest uncertainty. The data exclude neither a small penalty nor a small gain for full capture, and fidelity tier was not assigned to viewers; those with the equipment and subscription to play full recordings may differ from those who do not. A study that varied the tier experimentally for the same performer would settle the question.

5. Limitations

The panel is a sample of Sense/Net subscribers. Non-subscribers, and subscribers who did not respond, are absent, and the response rate was 81%. Attachment is likely to be higher among those who agreed to complete a survey about their favourite performers than among those who did not.

Exposure for flat-recorded performers is self-reported. We verified simstim hours against playback logs but had no comparable check for the flat-recorded performers, so measurement error in flat hours may differ from that in simstim hours and could contribute to the difference in slopes. Hours can also be recorded only for performers who were followed at all, so the log term says nothing about viewers who stopped. Fidelity applies only to simstim ratings, so the fidelity contrasts rest on simstim performers alone and on the tier each recording happened to carry. Attachment was measured with a self-report scale that has not been validated against behavioural measures of attachment such as repeated purchase.

Participants chose the performers they rated. We cannot distinguish the effect of format from the characteristics of the performers chosen, and the genre match between the two ratings is only as close as the four-category classification allows. Fidelity was chosen by viewers and producers and not assigned, and the three tiers are unevenly populated.

The survey is cross-sectional. Nothing here describes how attachment changes within a viewer over time, and the causal direction between hours and attachment is not identified. We offer no judgement on whether stronger attachment is good or bad for the audience.