[Dragon]

No, not really. You can have a completely unmoddable game with great gameplay, or a game where you need all the mods people made for it to be worth playing.

If the developers made the game moddable, that to me is steps they took towards enhancing the gameplay experience of the game, thus it would fall under gameplay.

No, they only provided a possibility for people to take those steps. One should not use community-made content when assessing quality of the base game. You don't judge, say, Harry Potter based on fanfiction or trivia written for it. As such, moddability does not fall under "gameplay", because it in itself provides nothing. A mod is a separate work, and as such, should be judged separately. The criteria are different than for assessing a complete game, but it's not in any way related to how good or bad the base is. "Bad, but someone could make it good" is only marginally better than "bad". It's irrelevant if somebody actually made it good, it's that person and that mod that deserves praise, not game devs and the base game. Moddability is good to have, but if it's the game's only good asset, then it's still a bad game that just happens to have a good engine for making better ones.

[Lorric]

I could see moddability as a separate thing if it was in terms of looking for it in a game because you like to mod games.

But people buying a game, for me, the credit does go to the maker for providing that capability. You have to buy the game to get to the mod.

In terms of people making a bad game, both deserve praise, the developers for making a game which was moddable and the modders for making the game good. There must have been something in the game the makers made to make it worth the trouble for the modders to make a good game of it. I'm not trying to take away from the accomplishments of modders, but we shouldn't take away the credit the makers deserve for providing that platform.

[Lorric]

I wish to say thank you to everyone who participated in this. it was a fun and interesting topic and I'm going to bookmark it.

If anyone still wants to get involved or anyone wants to return and say more, be my guest, it would be nice if there was still some life left in this topic. Otherwise, in a few days I'll make the poll visible to all and call it a day.