Did I really just read "the admins can control gamma" followed by "turn your monitor brightness down?" Logic these days, I swear.
Admin takes away gamma slider -> Player uses brightness slider on the monitor, video driver gamma adjustment, or in my case, the handy-dandy increased gamma mode buttons on my monitor, to crank it outside of the game's controls.
As to reducing the visual range so that gamma doesn't make a difference...it'd seem kinda strange to have planes appearing out of thin air. Moving the fog in to ridiculous closeness would work, I suppose, but still suffers from looking very odd.