Why does my Macbook suddenly lag playing games?

I just got Left 4 Dead 2 on steam for free, and decided to play it earlier today. It worked fairly well on low settings, as my macbook is fairly old (late 2009 model).
It has 4GB of RAM in it which is usually enough for games and so it proved... Until now.
The second time I loaded the game up it lagged unbearably, so bad the game audio just stopped completely, and the game was unplayable. I tried restarting the game, steam, and even purging my inactive memory all to no avail.
Only when I restarted the laptop did it actually work well enough to play.
I'm running OSX Mavericks so you know, so does anyone know why this would suddenly happen. I know Macs aren't designed for gaming but it's nice to be able to play something.
Cheers.

I'm afraid that I have exactly the same issue with my new MacBook. random appearance of the 'would you like to shutdown.....' dialog box. Which if not canceled just kills the power. It doesn't even go through the proper shutdown process and looses all unsaved changes etc.
It doesn't seem to happen when I'm at work with USB keyboard and mouse plugged in, so I guess it's something to do with the new built in keyboard and trackpad assembly.
Looking forward to a firmware update!

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