I went through something similar once when I was interviewing for an IT position in the Antarctic (I'd applied for positions at both McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott), and I was supposed to connect to their network simulator to troubleshoot and solve some network issue, but it wasn't working on their end so the interviewer walked me through the scenario, and responded as a DM would. - Quite frustratingly this was my 3rd interview for the position, and although I diagnosed and solved the DM'd scenario of a downed vlan issue in a Cisco environment in ~5 minutes of this off-the-cuff "simulation" using DM provided prompts, help menus, and outputs, I did not get the job. I think he penalized me for relying on the DM provided help menus and auto suggest tabbing...which is something anyone on a working simulator would have done. Which was a bummer because even though I was overqualified for the positions and would take a pay cut, I really wanted the experience of living for months in the Antarctic. So while I see the usefulness of this kind of interview, there are noteworthy issues of bias which a real simulator wouldn't begrudge you.
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