Linux Furs

I've been having problems for a bit now where I'll have my screen shut off on me due to incorrectly being considered idle when doing a variety of things, chiefly when an emulator is focused and my computer is only receiving any inputs from a controller via xinput (only mouse and keyboard inputs seem to be considered when determining whether the user is idle), or when I've got something like VLC focused and am watching a video and not touching any sort of input device at all. I'm looking for some way I can have idle timing take into account xinput inputs (something I imagine will probably be more broadly Linux related) as well as things like either video playback or when I have certain programs focused such as VLC or emulators like bsnes and Dolphin (which I imagine might be more reliant on awesomewm itself). I've tried looking but thus far have only encountered instructions on broadly changing how long until the screen suspends with xset, which doesn't really solve the issue as I'm likely to have my screen shut off on me still anyways if I do that, it'll just be a lot longer into i.e. a gaming session or watching a video or something that it'll happen. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there's a relatively obvious awesomewm Lua scripting thing I'm failing to consider.