Nearly five years after its initial announcement, Polytron's Fez arrives on Xbox Live Arcade this week. It's a great game that delivers on its unique premise, proving well worth the wait. And yet, many gamers have expressed their intention to forego playing Fez despite having followed its development avidly for so long. Quality and anticipation be damned; to them, Fez is simply off the table.

Why take such a strong stand about such an innocuous game? The issue isn't with Fez itself but rather its lead designer, Phil Fish, who has earned a reputation for brashness and outspoken opinions. While abrasive personalities are hardly uncommon in the independent game development scene to which Fish belongs, he earned himself considerable notoriety last month when he roundly condemned the sum total of Japanese game design as "terrible" in response to a question during his panel at Game Developers Conference 2012. Regardless of whether or not his was a fair assessment of a nation's collective creative output, what many potential customers took issue with was the tone of his remark --delivered directly to a question posed by veteran Japanese game developer Makoto Goto -- and Fish's subsequent defensive (occasionally hostile) rants in social media. Though he did eventually apologize both to Goto and the gaming community at large several days later, by then the damage was done and many forumgoers had turned their back on both Fish and his game, even after it won the Independent Games Festival grand prize for 2012.

Ideological boycotts are fairly new territory for video games, but anyone who follows more established media -- be it print, film, or music -- should be well familiar with them. Roman Polanski has directed award-winning movies, including The Pianist (which won an Oscar in 2003); yet to many the shadow of Polanski's arrest for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s forever undermines his creative integrity and renders his films unwatchable. And it's not just personal breaches of ethics that instigate boycotts; politics are equally turbulent. When members of country-western band The Dixie Chicks spoke out against George W. Bush and the war in Iraq several years ago, a significant portion of their audience took a stand against the band's music and the women themselves; some radio stations even pulled their music.

As video games establish themselves and gain acceptance as mainstream entertainment, the people who create them are gaining visibility, becoming public figures in their own right. Promoting game creators is hardly a new concept, of course; both Activision and Electronic Arts (perhaps somewhat ironically, given the way both companies are viewed today) launched three decades ago with the intent of giving developers the credit that had previously been denied them by corporations like Atari. And key creators like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and John Romero (formerly of id) have long enjoyed "celebrity developer" status through both merit and aggressive public relations. As the medium matures, more and more creators find themselves thrust into the spotlight -- and that means more and more creators have the opportunity to let their bad behavior and personal convictions come between them and their audience.

But where do we draw the line? At what point does the person behind the game overshadow the game itself? Do we apply different standards for a small game like Fez (whose four-man team means Fish really is the dominant driving force behind the game) versus a large-scale production like Valhalla's Devil's Third (whose executive producer Tomonobu Itagaki was accused of sexual harassment while at Tecmo but ultimately represents only the most visible of dozens of designers and programmers working on the game)? Gamers have long been quick to call for boycotts to defend their consumer rights when publishers make unpopular business decisions, but dealing with the more nebulous question of what creators do and think and how those stances affect their creations will only grow more common as developers become more visible.

Where do we draw the line? Consider the Dragon Quest series: The great-granddaddy of console role-playing games, Dragon Quest has defined the baseline for the genre and exerted a tremendous impact on pop culture at large for more than a quarter of a decade. Yet the man responsible for the series' memorable music since the very beginning, composer Koichi Sugiyama, is an avowed Japanese nationalist who denies his nation's World War II-era crimes in China and Korea. Sugiyama published a paid advertisement in the Washington Post disavowing Japanese war actions including the Rape of Nanking and the use of "comfort women." Does that mean gamers should abandon the Dragon Quest series? Do the extreme political stances of one person among the hundreds who have worked on the series over the years negate the value of Dragon Quest? If the issue seems too foreign to be trifled with, consider an equivalent (theoretical) scenario: If a German developer took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post denying the Holocaust and portraying Dachau and Auschwitz as falsehoods, would you still support his game?

Or consider something closer to home. Lorne Lanning played a prominent role in developing the classic Oddworld series. On an http://download.gamevideos.com/Podcasts/EGM/081307.mp3">episode of EGM Live several years ago, Lanning espoused unpopular conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001 attacks. Regardless of whether or not a video game podcast is the appropriate venue for that sort of talk, should Lanning's coming out as a 9/11 "Truther" affect his game for people who refuse to subscribe to that viewpoint?

Should developer politics matter at all? The GamePolitics blog reported the 2008 campaign donations of several notable industry figures. Is it fair to let the fact that Will Wright (the brilliant creator of classic games like SimCity) donated to John McCain's campaign affect your view of his work? Is it fair to let Harmonix boss Alex Rigopulos' massive $32,000 donation to the Obama campaign color your opinion of Rock Band? As private citizens, these men are well within their rights to participate in the American political system... yet the money they're donating to these causes ultimately comes from the pockets of consumers.

And what of sexual politics? Is it fair to write off the work of the developers at Eat Sleep Play simply because the studio's former boss, David Jaffe, made some ill-considered statements around the launch of their latest game that many branded as misogynistic? Electronic Arts is currently under siege for depicting same-sex relationships in games like Mass Effect 3; a couple of years ago, Chair's Shadow Complex came under fire for its connections to author Orson Scott Card, who is politically active against gay rights and gay marriage.

Where do we draw the line? As with other mediums, it's probably a matter best left to the individual. Personally speaking, I don't let a single individual negate the value of game. People are entitled to their opinions, wrong-headed as they may seem to me, and the majority of games are a collaborative process by many people whose contributions shouldn't be overshadowed by the public exploits of a single team member. A decade and a half of writing reviews has fostered in me a preference to separate creator from creation and judge games on their internal merits. Reviewing is a subjective enough process without involving individual social and political views -- though even that's not a cleanly drawn line. There's a place for personal beliefs in critical writing, such as Ryan Winterhalter's withering, subjective excoriation of Duke Nukem Forever.

I wouldn't expect everyone to share my perspective, though, and that's where the need to be an informed consumer comes into play. Gaming news blogs and social forums exist to bring these matters to the public conscious. Advocacy sites like GamePolitics highlight the socio-political factors behind games, while industry-facing sites like Gamasutra open a window on the creative process and the real people responsible for creating games. Whatever your politics and morals, and however you feel these should affect your behavior as a consumer, you have the tools to act on your beliefs. And as games continue to insinuate themselves as a mainstream form of entertainment, you'll find yourself forced to make these choices more and more frequently. Fez -- a great game surrounded by a few intemperate comments -- is only the beginning.