The idea of "slippery texts" provides a useful descriptor for materials that mutate and evolve across different media. Eight adult gamers, encountering the slippery text "American McGee's Alice," demonstrate a variety of ways in which players attempt to manage their attention as they encounter a new text with many resonances. The range of their start-up approaches provides insight into changing forms of literate behaviours. Players varied in the degree to which they emphasized focusing on the story or on the controls of the game in their initial approach to this text, but all made some use of the intertextual understanding they brought from other versions of "Alice." A kind of good-enough gaming was sought, in order to make progress in the early stages of the game. (Contains 1 table and 4 notes.)