Boogy at DU is a work of interactive fiction created using Twine that examines contemporary academic life through the lens of digital storytelling. Set within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Delhi’s North Campus, the narrative draws on familiar academic spaces like seminar rooms, corridors, hostels, and informal gathering points to explore the affective realities of doctoral study. The work is concerned with the experiences of PhD scholars navigating precarity, delayed timelines, informal power structures, and the emotional labour embedded within academic environments.

The narrative adopts deliberately playful, meme-inspired character names borrowed from contemporary social media slang. These names function as a stylistic strategy to foreground irony, fatigue, and subtle resistance within academic spaces, particularly those shaped by hierarchy, stagnation, and affective exhaustion. Drawing inspiration from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, the work uses humour and repetition not as satire alone, but as a mode of quiet refusal and reflection.

By employing the non-linear, choice-based structure of interactive fiction, Boogy at DU positions the reader as an active participant in the unfolding of academic life. The project contributes to digital humanities scholarship by reflecting on, critiquing, and imaginatively reframing the lived experiences of scholars within contemporary university settings, particularly in the context of Indian higher education.