Grokking (from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, via Koster) describes the moment when understanding of a pattern becomes fully internalised — not merely known but felt and operated at an intuitive level. A player who has grokked a mechanic no longer thinks about it; it has become part of their model of the game’s world. Koster uses grokking as the positive endpoint of the learning curve: the satisfaction of fully mastering a system (Koster 2005, see source-theory-of-fun).
After grokking, boredom is inevitable unless new patterns are introduced — the mechanic has been fully chunked.
Related: fun-as-learning, chunking, flow, systemic-depth-elegance