A digital pet (also known as a virtual pet or artificial pet ), is a type of artificial human companion. They are usually kept for companionship or enjoyment. People may keep a digital pet in lieu of a real pet.

Digital pets are distinct in that they have no concrete physical form other than the hardware they run on. Interaction with virtual pets may or may not be goal oriented. If it is, then the user must keep it alive as long as possible and often help it to grow into higher forms. Keeping the pet alive and growing often requires 'feeding', grooming and playing with the pet. If the interaction is not goal oriented, the user can explore the character of the pet and enjoy the feeling of building a relationship with it. Often these games use realistic visual effects or interaction to make the pet appear alive and give a sense of reality to users.

Digital pets can be "simulations of real animals, as in the Petz series" or "fantasy ones like the Tamagotchi". Unlike biological simulations, the pet does not usually reproduce. They generally do not die.

Gadget-based digital pets

Virtual pets such as Tamagotchi and Giga Pets, are sold on a self-contained, palm-sized computer. In the case of the Tamagotchi, a small screen has an image of the pet, while buttons on the case let the user perform different tasks, such as feeding, playing with, or washing the pet. Dissatisfied pets can emit beeps and sometimes "die".

Digimon was originally sold on a gadget similar to Tamagotchi's, but connected to other Digimon gadgets in order for the pets to fight.

Sonic Adventure 2 for the Sega Dreamcast had virtual pets, called Chao, which could be either used in game or transferred to the Visual Memory Unit, which enabled a transformation from game-based to gadget-based.

Web-based digital pets

Virtual petsites or bbmmo's (Browser Based MMO's) are usually free to play and accessible to all who sign up. They can be accessed through web browsers and often include a virtual community, Neopia in Neopets, Ettaworld in Ettapets, Wytheria on Wytheria: The Mystic Island or tiki village in MrTiki. In these worlds, you can play games to earn virtual money; which is usually spent on items and food for your pets.

Some sites adopt out pets to put on your webpage and use for roleplaying in chat rooms. They often require the adoptee to have a page ready for their pet. Sometimes they have a setup for breeding one's pets and then adopting them out.

Other sites that adopt out pets to put on a webpage are centered around writing for and breeding said pets to create newer, often 'showier' creatures. Members are often encouraged to create their own species of draconic creatures, to adopt from other members, and to breed the various species together. Unlike with some adoption agencies for webpage based cyberpets, where the owner of the species is the only one that can breed said species, the Nexus encourages all of its members to share and interbreed their species together, and the resulting offspring are usually adopted out to story-based or stats page-based web-pages.