The college I go to does a very similar setup; they have a packet shaper in place that throttles down common P2P/game ports to "it might as well be blocked" speeds, so that people can't use those applications. We're somewhat lucky though, in that they have the shaper set to let us play games from midnight to 8am, so we're not entirely cut off.
Anyhow, the trick is most likely to use different ports. Games don't tend to adapt to this strategy well(since the host is usually using the common port, and there's a master server on a common port), but some P2P applications will be able to bypass the shaper in this method. However, if they're doing shaping, then it's likely they don't want you doing that kind of stuff, so if you start doing something bandwidth intensive, they're likely to catch you, and administer the appropiate punishment. For P2P, you're mostly out of luck, but for games, have a talk with them if they're 24/7 blocked; allowing people to play games during the middle of the night isn't totally unreasonable.
PS This should be in software; it's not really a hardware issue
Facebook
Twitter