Ten years ago, “Half-Life” changed the way video games told stories.

Rather than introducing the player to Gordon Freeman and Black Mesa with an opening cinematic or text, the game let you play through a heavily scripted opening sequence on an unforgettable tram ride past toxic waste and robots, the intercom buzzing very revealing announcements in the background.

Scripted events worked wonderfully for “Half-Life,” turning the game into a cinematic, immersive experience, but games today have found new methods to do that. Scripted sequences still exist, but they are amorphous and hidden or written spontaneously and influenced by player action.

Infinity Ward, makers of “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” didn’t get the memo. What they created is a game which tells its story through incredibly complex scripted sequences that pan out with a movie-like choreography. (For this review, I’d like to look at the game’s narrative merits, rather than its very impressive graphical or multiplayer ones.)

Each level includes uncountable preprogrammed events. Helicopters and jet fighters fly overhead on cue. Tanks roll past your position. An enemy will crash into the tower you occupy. They’re very cinematic, but they repeat each and every time you play through “Call of Duty 4″ with a monotonous, robot-like precision that actually detracts from the game’s life.

Some levels are entirely made up of scripted events. One early level, for example, puts the player in the head of a deposed Middle-Eastern president on his way to his own execution. Men drag you down dusty streets, with enemies of the new regime being shot on all sides, and the player can do nothing but chose which way to look.

These scenes are emotionally stirring and place you in the world, but they fail to take advantage of the interactivity that makes games such an interesting artistic medium.

An example: Rather than having the lovably dutiful Captain Price turn to the character and spit out a one liner at the precise pre-programmed cue, give the good Captain a couple lines to say and have the game trigger a different line depending on the context. The game could track your accuracy rating, and Price could insult or praise it.

This approach extends beyond dialog. Rather than having a helicopter fly into a predefined position and open fire on the same target position every time, have it join in the action autonomously. Let it fly around the map at will, shooting at what it wants. Let it get shot down and crash where it will.

This isn’t a perfectly amorphous system, but it’s a step in the right direction, a step away from the linearity of scripted sequences.

Scripted events worked for “Half-Life” and the previous “Call of Duty” games, when they were all that technology allows. Today’s game machines have the processing power to do much more, to create cinematic events on the fly and develop and ever-changing and just as impressive world.

I hope that the “Call of Duty 4″ team at Infinity Ward try to develop a more fluid system for world events with their next game, rather than focus their talent on an increasingly antiquated method of doing things.