Everquest 2: SOE Helps Recover Missing Gamer

On Tuesday, Jacob Pribly, age 20, disappeared from his Minnesota home. His family, desperate for information, and knowing of their son's avid MMO playing, contacted much bemoaned, anti-gaming advocate, Miami Attoreny Jack Thompson. As the the publicity grew regarding Pribly's disappearance, Gamepolitics.com published a story regardin his disappearance. This is where SOE got involved.

According to Gamepolitics, they receivd a call from Andy Zaffron, Senior Vice-president and General Counsel at Sony Online Entertainment. Zaffron and the SOE staff looked up Pribly in their records, and found out he once played Everquest II. SOE then searched their records, and found Vanguard beta account linked to the same email address that was used on Pribly's old EQ2 account. The Vanguard beta account was however made out to someone entirely different, living in Chicago.

Armed with this the family was able to get help tracking down young Pribly, whom they have now spoken to. As for Thompson's reply?

We found the Pribyl boy. He is in Illinois holed up with crazed gamers. We found him because of my going public and good police work. Tell your sycophantic, panting audience that. He plays Lineage and World of Warcraft. He said he is with the gamers he met online. He is still in Illinois, and he won't return. Maybe (former ESA president) Doug Lowenstein can talk him home.

Nice job on working your cause Jack. Of course what effort Thompson actually did in helping to find Jacob is unknown, and it seems to be entirely the work of SOE and GP (GP states that "SOE did 99.999% of the work. GP was simply gratified to be able to participate in a process that hopefully will be of some assistance to the Pribyls and Jacob"). So while it's nice that Jack Thompson feels the need to try to take some credit for this, while at the same time working his agenda, I feel the need to tell him a few things:

1) While a son disappearing may be tragic, panic inducing and a horrible thing to imagine, it does not appear he was kidnapped, coerced, or otherwise influenced, and while Jacob maybe young, at 20 he is a legal adult, and may freely move about as he choses. While we may question the wisdom of not informing anyone, he doesn't have to, and does not need to return home if he does not wish to. Therefore it does not appear that anything illegal, in the slightest, occured, which certainly a lawyer would know. And as nothing illegal occured, Jack Thompson doesn't really seem to have much villian to direct his rants and raves at.

2) You didn't do jack, Jack.

You can read the full story here. We all here are glad for a good resolution, and happy that Jacob's family can breath a sigh of relief.

Now go home kid before you give your parents a heart attack.

Update 01/22/07: Jack Thompson contacted WarCry in response to this article and we wanted to include that he disputes SOE's assertion that they were involved in finding the missing man. He told WarCry: "The parents talked to the boy before SOE got involved."