Gay marriage is not permitted -- at least not in Nintendo's virtual world.

On Tuesday, Nintendo said that it will not allow characters of the same gender to marry in the English version of its Nintendo 3DS game "Tomadachi Life," The Associated Press reported.

"Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of 'Tomodachi Life,'" Nintendo of America Inc. said in a statement.

The announcement comes after Tye Marini, a gay man from Mesa, Arizona, started a campaign to pressure Nintendo into changing the game's rules. He encourages supporters to spread the #Miiquality hashtag.

"The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation," Nintendo's statement continued. "We hope that all of our fans will see that 'Tomodachi Life' was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary."

In "Tomadachi Life," players live on a virtual island with other Mii characters where they can frolic around and date one another, but Marini said his options are still limited.

"I want to be able to marry my real-life fiancé's Mii, but I can't do that," the 23-year-old said in a video he posted this week. "My only options are to marry some female Mii, to change the gender of either my Mii or my fiancé's Mii or to completely avoid marriage altogether and miss out on the exclusive content that comes with it."

Nintendo advertises that the game allows players to "fall in love," but Marini said because of this limitation, the game is less realistic.

"It's more of an issue for this game because the characters are supposed to be a representation of your real life," Marini told AP. "You import your personalized characters into the game. ... You give them a voice. They just can't fall in love if they're gay."

In Japan, where Nintendo is based, gay marriage is not legal.

"The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localize it for other regions outside of Japan," Nintendo told AP in a statement. "We will continue to listen and think about the feedback. We're using this as an opportunity to better understand our consumers and their expectations of us at all levels of the organization."

Nintendo will release "Tomodachi Life" in North America and Europe on June 6.

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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @SH____4.

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