For example: I’m losing a game but then my team starts to defeat the enemy more and more until we win. Why does this occur?
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It’s taken from physics, the word is used to describe the observation that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. In the case you describe it just means that taking an advantage might mean you keep the advantage, but being a borrowed word it is more of a metaphor.
tl;dr It’s a meaningless way to explain long runs of success in a game *after the fact*.
In science momentum is a property of objects that they get from their weight (technically their mass), their speed, and their direction. Fast, heavy things have lots of momentum, and slow, light things have little momentum.
The key is that, in science, objects with momentum keep their momentum unless something happens to change it. So a fast, heavy object will keep moving fast in whatever direction it is going until something gets in there to stop it. (This is known as Newton’s first law, by the way.)
This law from science has been extended by metaphor to people and games. The idea is that if something is moving metaphorically in one direction, it will continue to move in that direction. Because it’s just a metaphor, it’s really dubious whether it’s true in any given situation.
In games people often explain long runs of success with the momentum metaphor, without any explanation of why it’s true. They also ignore changes in who is doing well, even though they completely contradict the concept of momentum. Your example is a good one:
* Your team starts to win more and more: momentum!
* Your team suddenly switched from losing to winning: don’t mention momentum!
Edit to add: sometimes momentum in games is real. There are games in which it is easier to play well when you are already winning. Arm wrestling and tug-of-war, for example. Real wrestling (in which the wrestlers reset their positions between points) doesn’t really have momentum.
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