Eye care

At Caffeine Withdrawal Games we're always facing the negative aspects of using screens for way too many hours of the day: headaches, red painful eyes and tiredness. And we're certain our users experience it too.
The obvious solution is simple and probably effective: stop using screens. Or at least, use them less frequent. Nobody ever tried it.
During the long time we spent as professionals and hobbyists, we discovered tips and tricks that make displays bearable, so we decided add specific sections in our software and in the page below. The reason is that eye care is a growing issue that's very rarely taken into consideration by decision makers.
Please note are all the points we mention are the results of more than a decade in experimenting on ourselves. Everything here works to some extent for us, but since we're all different individuals, it might not work for you. Maybe also because eye issues have multiple causes: too high/too low contrast or brightness, poor light spectrum, fonts too small, flicker, screen reflections, currently unknown factors. Most of the causes apply to both screens and room lightning. For example, if you decide to eliminate flicker, you should do it for all your screens and home / office lightning.
Also, there is no miracle cure. But we're always looking for improvements and we will share anything new as soon as it comes to our attention.
Despite the fact that a lot of the points discussed here require drastic measures, we hope you at least try some of them. Also very important is to understand what you are sensitive to so you can better protect against it.

• Pay attention to symptoms. While we live in an age that requires you to always push your boundaries, it's not normal to ignore headaches, eye pain or fatigue.
  We've all done it: power through a headache to meet a deadline. Or feel tired at the end of the day. But this easily becomes a habit: you need to take action if you have headaches at the end of each day or you've gotten used to the way you look with red eyes.
• Avoid treating the symptoms instead of the actual cause. Sometimes it's just easier to just take a pill for your air-conditioning induced headache instead of arguing with your co-workers to turn it off. Or it's easier to take eye drops instead of setting your monitor properly.
• Educate others about bad habits that develop using screens. Some people are unaffected by poor lightning, but those who are might not even know it. Even worse, some will be affected without any symptoms and will only notice it when it's too late. And, if there are more of us, we could fight back against, for example, bad eye care practices at work.
• Adjust the brightness of your screen. It should match the brightness of the environment. It stresses the eyes if it's too bright or too dark. Don't hesitate to frequently tweak it (or use screens with auto brightness).
  Bright screens look prettier, but remember that loosing sight will definetly make you a worse gamer or it might severely affect your career. NEVER use screens in complete darkness expecially the tiny ones on mobile phones.
• Buy screens with eye health technologies: like no flicker or low blue light, instead of buying the brightest one in the shop. This way, you're pressuring manufacturers to focus their attention in the right direction and away from their goal to create always brighter screens. While no flicker or low blue light are far from fully fixing the problem, at least it's a good step forward: the manufacturers are at least acknowledging there's work to be done in this area.
  Keep an eye out for emerging technologies, like ePaper computer screens or 2nd gen quantum dots.
• Use daylight as much as possible and avoid artificial light.
  Some offices use drawn window blinds and bright neon lights even in plain daylight. Try to improve the situation or stay away from such an office.
  Artificial light is bad for multiple reasons: it flickers, it creates high contrast, it might be too bright or it has uneven color spectrums.
• If you're sensitive to high contrast/brightness, stay away from places that use a lot of lights or spotlights. Offices tend to use a lot more light than necessary. To better expose their wares, stores do the same.
  You could use dark glasses to make it easier for your eyes. Now you can even make even your prescription glasses darker.
  Note: dark glasses should not be used all the time, but only in bright/high contrast situations. Otherwise, your eyes will become even more sensitive to light. Avoid using too much light in your home, expecially the bad kind of light.
• Stay away from (excessive) LED light. LED flickers because of cheap electronics. By themselves LEDs are flicker free, but the electronics powering them make them flicker by doing a poor AC to DC conversion or using PWM to control the brightness. PWM is a cheap way to dim LEDs and it works by switching the LED on and off very rapidly. By precisely increasing the tiny duration during which the bulb is off, the perceived brightness is reduced. The brain is tricked into thinking there's less light coming in from the device. Actually it flashes very rapidly from 0% to 100% brightness bypassing the eye's auto adjustment mechanism against bright light. If you go in bright sunlight, your eyes reduce the opening of the iris to protect themselves. If you stay in front of a computer screen using PWM and reduce the brightness to 30%, the LEDs will flicker to 100% brightness but your eyes will think it's 30% brightness and may not try to compensate.
  Notable exceptions for flicker-free illumination can be found on this website.
  LEDs produce ultraviolet light which is converted to white light because of a phosphorus coating. Because of this, LED light is shifted towards the blue and more energetic end of the spectrum with potentially bad long term effects.
  LEDS with warm light are somewhat better, but do not fix the spectrum problem.
• Stay away from (excessive) neon light. Neon flickers because light is generated by electrical discharges in a tube filled with a specific noble gas. The flicker is not that bad as the one produced by LEDs, but it might still affect flicker-sensitive individuals, expecially because the flicker frequency for neon tubes is very low: 50/60Hz ( it turns on and off 50/60 times per second with some individuals noticing it as actual flicker not as constant light).
  CFL is the same as neon light, but with a spiral tube and a normal light bulb socket.
  Similar to LED, Neon/CFL produces ultraviolet light which is converted to white light because of a phosphorus coating. Because of this, neon/CFL light is shifted towards the blue and more energetic end of the spectrum with potentially bad long term effects.
  Neon tubes or CFL bulbs with warm light are somewhat better, but do not fix the spectrum problem. Notable exceptions for flicker-free illumination can be found on this website.
• If you have a choice, please use tungsten light bulbs. It's far from perfect, but it's the better of the lot.
  Because of thermal inertia, tungsten lightbulbs are better than neon (including CFL) or LEDs.
  They still flicker, but from 85% to 100% brightness (as opposed to LEDS which flicker from being off to full brigthness) .
  Note: there are LED lights which mimic the classic light bulbs. But they are still LED ligths and should be avoided. You can differentiate by looking at the filament itself: if it's yellow and straight, it LED; if it's gray and curly, it's tungsten.
  Tungsten lightbulbs have the light spectrum shifted towards red which might still cause disconfort. For US 110V AC there there are available full spectrum tungsten lighbulbs which might improve the problem.
• Avoid purchasing mobile phones/laptops employing PWM. You can check if the device/laptop has PWM by using this site. You can also detect low frequency PWM (which is considered the worst) by recording the screen using the slow motion camera on your phone. If during playback you notice any dark/shifting bands/zones over the screen, it has PWM.
  Note: some gaming screens induce flicker when using technologies that sync the frequency of the monitor to the fps produced by the video card. Do a proper research before purchase.
• More to come here. Please also submit your experiences, expecially if you discover new types of lightning or screens than the ones already mentioned on this site.