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Social gaming platform Zynga takes a lot of flak for its overbearing management practices and obsession with metrics over user experience. While those rumors may or may not be true, there is more to Zynga than calculating sessions lengths and daily average users. In fact, Zynga's Germany branch is one of the global leaders in HTML5 development and creating dynamic mobile Web games. We chatted with Zynga Germany CTO Paul Bakaus about how Zynga approaches HTML5, what are the limitations of the spec and if we will ever see a Facebook app store.

Zynga has a variety of open source HTML5 projects in GitHub along with several new HTML5 game releases, including Words With Friends and Zynga Poker Mobile Web. As many Web-based game developers will tell you, those are not easy to create. See below for our interview with Bakaus and what Zynga is doing to move the HTML5 spec and ecosystem forward.

Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter.

Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.

The iPhone is the domain of the game. Android is the land of the app. 2011 showed some very distinct trends in user activity on the two major mobile platforms. A study done by Xylogic shows that of the top 25 app publishers for iOS, only one does not produce games. On the flip side, of the top 25 for Android, only about half are game publishers.

Burbn, the maker of Instagram, was the only top iOS publisher to not be a gamer. Of the top 10 downloaded app on the App Store in November 2011, only two were apps: Instagram and Pinterest. Why do games perform so much better in the App Store than the Android Market?

With less than a week to go before Amazon starts shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the company today announced the inclusion of several more Android apps. The list of new additions includes Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and many other hugely popular apps.

Quite a few of the applications Amazon announced today are games. Apps from Zynga, EA, Rovio and a number of other mobile game makers are going to be included on the Kindle Fire, which substantially expands the catalog of games available on the device.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome.

Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement. Can Qrank extend that formula out across the mobile web?

Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, has announced today that CityVille will be its first social building game on Google Plus. Zynga Poker launched with the rest of the Google Plus game platform in August, but this is Zynga's first Google game in the mold of their virally successful Facebook titles.

Zynga has over 146 million users of its social games, but they're almost entirely on Facebook. But as we reported in July 2010, Google quietly invested over $100 million in the gaming company, ensuring that major Zynga titles on the Google platform were only a matter of time.

Last week in Anaheim, in amongst the crowd of developers at Microsoft's Build 2011 conference assimilating the news about Windows 8, was a team from a London, U.K.-based company called YoYo Games. In 2000, that company released an interesting entry-level game development and distribution platform called, quite simply, GameMaker. Following in the hallowed footsteps of the great computer game platforms of the 1980s and '90s, it introduced a stand-alone interpreter whose language borrowed a bit from Pascal.

Ever since Google's latest social platform, Google+, began limited testing in late June, the question among both prospective developers and prospective members has been, how will it compare to Facebook with respect to privacy? Although Facebook has taken incremental steps to help its users protect the data they may intentionally or inadvertently share with other people directly, Facebook has been notorious for the degree of frankness its platform presents to its applications.

Google has been particularly careful about demonstrating its concern for protecting its members' personally identifiable information (PII), and an update late Friday to its engineering director, David Glazer's Google+ stream was no exception. Giving the first technical details about the forthcoming Google+ Games platform - the first apps platform for Google's new social network - Glazer said end-user information would only be obtained through direct user consent.

Here come the Google Plus games. Google has announced a big move toward mainstream adoption today, integrating Web-based games within the brand new social network. "We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life," the announcement says. Titles include Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker and Sudoku. Google has launched a new Google Plus Platform Blog to help encourage more.

Google seems a bit concerned about the distraction factor, though, and it wants to make sure these games don't get in the way of your +1ing, sharing and other important Google Plus business. "Games in Google Plus are there when you want them and gone when you don't," the announcement says. "If you're not interested in games, it's easy to ignore them."

Since the release of Google's new social network, there's been a lot of speculation about when and if Google Plus would get a gaming component. Early inquiry into the site's code certainly hinted at the possibility, and now more signs have been uncovered.

Slashgear reports that the Games Stream has been confirmed, pointing to wording on the Google Plus Help pages - now removed - that referenced games and potentially a separate stream for finding game-related updates.