Need creative way to hide custom ES screensaver videos

[dsstrainer]

ES screensavers use game videos as screensavers. I prefer to use a pre-defined set of videos instead.

In the older versions of ES, you could fool the system by simply adding <game> tags with only <video> tags to one of the gamelist.xml files in your system. That would let me have random videos played from a folder during the screensaver.

<gameList>
    <game><video>/home/pi/RetroPie/splashscreens/vid1.mp4</video></game>
    <game><video>/home/pi/RetroPie/splashscreens/vid2.mp4</video></game>
    ......
</gamelist>

But in more recent versions, ES now requires that the <path> both exists and isn't already used

<game><path>./ss.txt</path><video>/home/pi/RetroPie/splashscreens/vid1.mp4</video></game>

Problem is, if <path> is defined, ES will add it to the list of games, even if it's not one of the supported extensions under es_systems.cfg

So I'm trying to find a way to not make them list in the game list.

I've tried simply ss.txt.. it just shows as "ss"
I've tried _ss.txt.. it shows as "_ss"
I've tried .ss.txt.. it shows as ".ss"
I've tried .ss ... it shows as a blank line
I've set ES "Show hidden files" to false
I've tried ES "gamelists only"

No dice
Any ideas?