Virtual pet

A virtual pet (also known as a digital pet, artificial pet, or pet-raising simulation) is a type of artificial human companion. They are usually kept for companionship or enjoyment, or as an alternative to a real pet.

Digital pets 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. Some digital pets require more than just food to keep them alive. Daily interaction is required in the form of playing games, virtual petting, providing love and acknowledgment can help keep your virtual pet happy and growing healthy.

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

Virtual pet sites are usually free to play for all who sign up. They can be accessed through web browsers and often include a virtual community, such as Neopia in Neopets. In these worlds, a user can play games to earn virtual money which is usually spent on items and food for pets. One large branch of virtual pet games are sim horse games.

The discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player in late 2020 affected numerous browser-based games, including virtual pet websites that had relied on Flash technology. Platforms such as Neopets reported technical challenges during the transition away from Flash and prioritized restoring core features using modern web technologies.

Some sites adopt out pets to put on a webpage and use for role-playing 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.

There are many video games that focus on the care, raising, breeding or exhibition of simulated animals. Such games are described as a sub-class of life simulation game. Since the computing power is more powerful than with webpage or gadget based digital pets, these are usually able to achieve a higher level of visual effects and interactivity. Pet-raising simulations often lack a victory condition or challenge, and can be classified as software toys.

The pet may be capable of learning to do a variety of tasks. "This quality of rich intelligence distinguishes artificial pets from other kinds of A-life, in which individuals have simple rules but the population as a whole develops emergent properties". For artificial pets, their behaviors are typically "preprogrammed and are not truly emergent".