Why is a "main" game loop necessary for developing a game?

I find that most game development requires a main game loop, but I don't know why it's necessary. Couldn't we implement an event listener and respond to every user action? Animations (etc.) could then be played when a event occurs.

What is the purpose of a main game loop?

The argument that you "need a loop because otherwise what calls the event listener" does not hold water. Admittedly on any mainstream OS, you do indeed have such a loop, and event listeners do work that way, but it is entirely possible to make an interrupt driven system that works without any loops of any kind.

But you still would not want to structure a game that way.

The thing that makes a loop the most appealing solution is that your loop becomes what in real-time programming is referred to as a 'cyclic executive'. The idea is that you can make the relative execution rates of the various system activities deterministic with respect to one another. The overall rate of the loop may be controlled by a timer, and that timer may ultimately be an interrupt, but with modern OS's, you will likely see evidence of that interrupt as code that waits for a semaphore (or some other synchronization mechanism) as part of your "main loop".

So why do you want deterministic behavior? Consider the relative rates of processing of your user's inputs and the baddies AIs. If you put everything into a purely event based system, there's no guarantee that the AIs won't get more CPU time than your user, or the other way round, unless you have some control over thread priorities, and even then, you're apt to have difficulty keeping timing consistent.

Put everything in a loop, however, and you guarantee that your AIs time-lines are going to proceed in fixed relationship with respect to your user's time. This is accomplished by making a call out from your loop to give the AIs a timeslice in which to decide what to do, a call out to your user input routines, to poll the input devices to find out how your user wants to behave, and call out to do your rendering.

With such a loop, you have to watch that you are not taking more time processing each pass than actually goes by in real time. If you're trying to cycle your loop at 100Hz, all your loop's processing had better finish up in under 10msec, otherwise your system is going to get jerky. In real-time programming, it's called overrunning your time frame. A good system will let you monitor how close you are to overrunning, and you can then mitigate the processing load however you see fit.

An event listener is also dependent on some invocation loop whether you see it or not. Who else is going to call the listener?

Building an explicit game loop gives you absolute control on what's going on so you won't be dependent on whatever some toolkit/event handling library does in its event loop.

A game loop (highly simplified is as follows)

initialise
do
     input
     update
     render
loop
clean up

This will happen every frame the game is drawn. So for games that run at 60fps the above is performed sixty times every second.

This means the game runs smoothly, the game stays in sync and the updates/draws per cycle happen frequently enough. Animation is simply a trick of the eye, objects move between locations but when played quickly enough they appear to be travelling between these locations.

If you were to only update on user input, the game would only react when the user was providing input. Other game components such as A.I game objects would not react on their own. A loop is therefore the easiest and best way of updating a game.