Yesterday, Skyrim got a creation kit marginally prettier arrow quivers , and a Valve-branded sphere that doubled as a Valve-branded hat . Oh, and also,. Well, kind of, anyway. And yet, all anyone could talk about were those first three things. Let's change that.I'm referring, of course, to the launch of Steam Workshop's modding functionality. Sure, Team Fortress 2 previously used the Workshop's infernal fires to run a gun-and-hat forge, but that was the full extent of it. And even then, if Valve didn't put its stamp of approval on creators' handiwork, it was back to the old drawing board.However, now that Skyrim's allowing direct submissions to the Workshop proper, this seemingly miniscule portion of the Steam Empire is starting to pick up, er, steam. Which is all to say, yes, I quite enjoyed finding a Space-Core-shaped easter egg during my Skyrim escapades yesterday, but you know what I liked even more?Short of taking over the portions of my brain that breathe and blink, the process couldn't have been any more convenient. I clicked the "subscribe" button, I opened the game, and ta-fus-ro-dah: my mod checked for updates and then declared itself good to go. Quick, elegant, and simple. No muss, no fuss. If hunting for mods was once like spearing buffalo in the sun-seared fields, we've now inched toward the height of human civilization: a fast food establishment.And that is -- believe it or not -- a big damn deal. Modding is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible things about PC gaming, but it's a niche. When non-Master-Race gamers look at PC gaming, they emit guttural shouts and recoil in fear of overwhelming complexity. (Incorrect) legend has it that PCs are unruly, demanding beasts, requiring constant brain-surgery-level hardware tinkering and deep sea dives into the strange world of files, folders, drives, and manual updates. Dispelling even a small part of that myth is key.I mean, look at what iTunes did many years ago. It made music purchases more attractive than piracy for the masses simply by chopping a bunch of monotonous steps out of the process. Folks were suddenly more than happy to fork over their hard-earned cash, simply because they could snag songs in one click instead of 10 or 11. And hey, Steam Workshop's free, so that last barrier to entry's been preemptively demolished.And that's just the beginning. Steam Workshop has the potential to ratchet up modding's convenience factor in a way that dwarfs even one-click convenience: by unifying the whole process. At the moment, mods are disparate. Sure, services like ModDB/Desura have excellent feature sets of their own, but they lack Steam's reach and connectedness. If Steamthrows its weight behind the mod scene, everyone will notice. And a surge in demand generally equals quite a bit more supply. More people playing mods means more people making them.However, there are still a few hurdles to clear. Most obviously, Workshop's currently hobbling over the starting line with one game. Sure, it's a big game, but it's still akin to dipping a figurative pinky toe in the ocean. Also, Workshop isn't quite fully integrated with the rest of Steam just yet. For example, a "Mods" tab up top or a Workshop link on the Skyrim page in my game library would make things simpler (and more enticing to folks who've never modded anything before) still. And the lack of a search bar is out-and-out dumb. Finally -- and perhaps most importantly -- Workshop requires a set of official mod tools whose gears lock perfectly with Steam's. So until developers who don't traditionally release mod tools decide to change their ways, you won't see their games getting the souped up hotrod treatment in the Workshop.But those are creaky bits that absolutely can (and probably will) get massive dollops of spit 'n' shine with time. It seems, then, that Valve's off to a solid start, and its "slow and steady wins the race" policy stands to take home gold yet again. And if not, well, at least we got an adorable space-obsessed robot in a swords 'n' sorcery game. That's something, right?