Digital fiction is fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium.

Digital fiction as a genre thus does not include blogs, communitarian digital fiction, digital storytelling, and any other form of digital narrative that does not qualify as fiction. While we welcome the authorial democratization that Web 2.0 technology permits and wholeheartedly support research that seeks to understand it, life narratives are fundamentally nonfiction and therefore beyond our remit. It similarly does not include e-books or games we can’t ‘read’, or rather games where there is no dynamic relationship between the gameplay (rules) and its themes (representations) that we can read into, reflect on, or interpret.

This definition is written by Bob Ryan and taken from "[S]creed for Digital Fiction" (2010) by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Dave Ciccoricco, Hans Rustad, Jess Laccetti and Jessica Pressman in the electronic book review.